The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy: Provocations and Engagements [1st ed. 2019] 978-3-030-24917-5, 978-3-030-24918-2

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-x
Introduction: Provocation to Philosophy (William H. Koch)....Pages 1-6
The Ass I Kick Today May Be the Ass I’ll Have to Kiss Tomorrow: What’s Up with the Sacrifice of Women in the Films of Lars von Trier? (S. West Gurley)....Pages 7-17
Film as Phantasm: Dogville’s Cinematic Re-evaluation of Values (Rebecca A. Longtin)....Pages 19-35
Manderlay and the Universe of American Whiteness (José A. Haro)....Pages 37-46
Art and Myth: Beyond Binaries (Susanne Claxton)....Pages 47-61
The Need of the Antichrist to Tame the Wild Tongue of Nosotras (Rosario Torres-Guevara)....Pages 63-77
Lars von Trier: Traversing the Fantasy of the Child (William H. Koch)....Pages 79-90
Melancholia’s End (Timothy Holland)....Pages 91-101
Would It Be Bad If the Human Race Ceased to Exist? Melancholia and the Import of Human Existence (Hans Pedersen)....Pages 103-116
It Is There in the Beginning: Melancholia, Time, and Death (Jessica S. Elkayam)....Pages 117-132
Back Matter ....Pages 133-141

Citation preview

The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy Provocations and Engagements Edited by José A. Haro William H. Koch

The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy

José A. Haro  •  William H. Koch Editors

The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy Provocations and Engagements

Editors José A. Haro Department of Social Sciences Human Services and Criminal Justice Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York New York, NY, USA

William H. Koch Department of Academic Literacy and Linguistics, Borough of Manhattan Community College City University of New York New York, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-24917-5    ISBN 978-3-030-24918-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24918-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Sandy and Joe… Thanks for tolerating this project and loving us.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Provocation to Philosophy  1 William H. Koch 2 The Ass I Kick Today May Be the Ass I’ll Have to Kiss Tomorrow: What’s Up with the Sacrifice of Women in the Films of Lars von Trier?  7 S. West Gurley 3 Film as Phantasm: Dogville’s Cinematic Re-evaluation of Values 19 Rebecca A. Longtin 4  Manderlay and the Universe of American Whiteness 37 José A. Haro 5 Art and Myth: Beyond Binaries 47 Susanne Claxton 6 The Need of the Antichrist to Tame the Wild Tongue of Nosotras 63 Rosario Torres-Guevara 7 Lars von Trier: Traversing the Fantasy of the Child 79 William H. Koch vii

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Contents

8 Melancholia’s End 91 Timothy Holland 9 Would It Be Bad If the Human Race Ceased to Exist? Melancholia and the Import of Human Existence103 Hans Pedersen 10 It Is There in the Beginning: Melancholia, Time, and Death117 Jessica S. Elkayam Index133

Notes on Contributors

Susanne Claxton  is Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Southern New Hampshire University. She completed her PhD at the University of New Mexico in 2015. She is the author of Heidegger’s Gods: An Ecofeminist Perspective (2017) and the essay “Poetry and the Gods: From Gestell to Gelassenheit” in Heidegger on Technology (2018). Jessica S. Elkayam  is an instructor in the Department of Philosophy and affiliate faculty in both Women’s and Gender Studies and the Honors Program at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. She received her PhD in 2016 from Villanova University and specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Continental (or European post-Kantian) philosophies of time. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Liminal Temporalities: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the End of Metaphysics. The central role of attunement in this and other projects related to time may explain her proclivity to explore questions relating philosophy to art, and the latter’s capacity—especially when the medium is film—to move us. S.  West  Gurley  is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sam Houston State University, where he teaches Existentialism, Aesthetics, Philosophy in Film and Literature, and History of Philosophy. He authored Minding the Gap: What It Is to Pay Attention Following the Collapse of the Subject/ Object Distinction (2013) and co-edited Phenomenology and the Political (2015). His primary interests revolve around clarifying what it is to pay attention and he draws from the Continental European tradition, specifically French and German thinkers, of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ix

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

José  A.  Haro is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Borough of Manhattan Community College. His research focuses on illuminations and critiques of the colonial and neocolonial structures, thoughts, and practices. Timothy  Holland  is an assistant professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Emory University and coeditor of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. His forthcoming monograph investigates the overlooked role of cinema in Jacques Derrida’s oeuvre, as well as the timeliness of deconstruction for contemporary film and media studies. William H. Koch  is an assistant professor in the Department of Academic Literacy and Linguistics at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY). His recent publications include “Achilles and the (Sexual) History of Being” in Transgressing the Limit: Borders and Liminality in Philosophy and Literature and “Phenomenology and the Impasse of Politics” in Phenomenology and the Political. Rebecca  A.  Longtin  is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York in New Paltz. Her research brings together phenomenology, critical theory, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy to address the meaning of sensory experience and how its transformations across historical and cultural contexts bear upon our understanding of the self and world. Hans Pedersen  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His research is mainly focused on phenomenology and existentialism, particularly on issues surrounding agency, freedom, and responsibility. Rosario Torres-Guevara  is an associate professor at the Department of Academic Literacy and Linguistics at BMCC, CUNY.  She specializes in Border Theory, Intercultural Education, Indigenous Knowledges, and Decolonial Pedagogy. Her most recent publications are “El camino que lleva a mi tierra: El poder de los saberes otros y transnacionales en la educacion descolonial” in the Pluriversidad Amawtay Wasi Online Journal and “Pedagogía decolonial en la universidad del Siglo XXI]” in UNAM De Raíz Diversa Journal.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Provocation to Philosophy William H. Koch

Abstract  This introduction considers Lars von Trier’s own reflections on art and his work as presented in his most recent movie The House that Jack Built. It then presents a brief overview of the topics and problems addressed in the book’s chapters, framing each chapter in terms of how it engages in philosophical investigations provoked by von Trier’s work. Keywords  Lars von Trier • Film • Philosophy In Lars von Trier’s most recent movie The House that Jack Built, the main character Jack reflects on the nature of art. As he speaks the screen is filled with clips from many of von Trier’s films, all but assaulting us with the idea that his works should be considered in light of Jack’s statements and perhaps the movie as a whole: Some people claim that the atrocities we commit in our fiction are those inner desires which we cannot commit in our controlled civilization. So they are expressed, instead, through our art. I don’t agree. I believe heaven and hell are one and the same. The soul belongs to heaven and the body to hell. The soul is reason and the body is all the dangerous things, for example art and icons. W. H. Koch (*) Department of Academic Literacy and Linguistics, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Haro, W. H. Koch (eds.), The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24918-2_1

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There are reasons to be skeptical of Jack as a stand-in for von Trier, though von Trier certainly provokes this interpretation in a very intentional way. Jack is a serial killer who views his violence as art. Von Trier is an artist who has frequently been accused of violence against the audience through his films as well as blatant misogyny and the outright abuse of his actresses. It is possible to think of him as an artist who has been implicated in serial violence both in his work and through his actions. A book such as this wouldn’t be honest if it didn’t confess to anxiety in engaging extensively with the work of someone about whom there is much reason to be uncomfortable. The material requires that we think and write against it, even as we work through it, with hermeneutic suspicion and care. In his surface identification with Jack, it is clear von Trier himself recommends such anxiety and caution in the face of his work. Despite the intentional resemblance, however, it is hard to imagine von Trier extensively identifying with Jack or trusting his evaluations of his work. Jack is successful as a killer more by chance and fate than through his skill or art. He is a largely clumsy and incompetent monster. The “artistic” nature of his kills is largely pedantic or crass. Though he pictures himself as very clever and subtle, choosing the name “Mr. Sophistication” for his serial-killing persona, he is far from sophisticated or even all that interesting. His most artistic characteristic is that he is an engineer who dreams of being an architect, and he crafts careful models and plans for a house he will one day build. However, he turns out to be utterly incapable of creating his house. As an artist, Jack is a banal failure. Perhaps we should take this to mean that Jack is not von Trier or that von Trier’s violent “killer” side is banal and uninteresting in comparison to the other characteristics of his art. Or, perhaps, art itself is overestimated in terms of its own qualities, no different from the pile of frozen and mutilated bodies that constitute Jack’s “house” near the end of the film. Determining how we should interpret The House that Jack Built in relation to Lars von Trier’s entire body of work is beyond the scope of this introduction. But it does provide us with a useful fulcrum from which to address the question of what philosophers are doing mucking about with the films of von Trier. Art, Jack insists, is one of the dangerous things of the body and of hell. Reason, and we might replace this with philosophy, is of the soul and of heaven. If heaven and hell, body and soul are one, we can see philosophy as a useful impetus for art or, more to our point, art as a necessary provocation to philosophy. As Longtin states in the second essay, “von Trier presents film as a powerful art form for suspending and

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evaluating how we see and understand the world, which makes it the ­perfect medium for moral provocations aimed at self-examination.” The movies of Lars von Trier impact us, often enough, at the bodily level, provoking visceral disgust, rage, fear, and despair—as Gurley states in Chap. 1 they “gut us and leave us lying on the floor.” For many of us, the unavoidable response to such an experience is to think, to reflect, and eventually to speak and write. We are provoked to philosophy by the bodily impact of von Trier’s assault. We are also provoked by the importance and agonizing demand of the questions and problems his movies raise—problems translated to a bodily experience that insists on a reply. If this is a major reason why philosophers are interested in the films of Lars von Trier, it does not yet make clear why others might find useful what it is we have to say about them. Why should you turn to the philosophers in this volume to assist you in grappling with von Trier’s work? There is a methodological connection between the way that von Trier’s movies achieve their effect and the way in which philosophy operates. Philosophy, often enough, shocks and discomforts us. It might begin in wonder, but it tends to live out its life in the medium of the uncanny and uncertain. The process of interrogating the obvious, the immediate, and the fundamental is not without its costs and sacrifices. Frequently it can only achieve its effect—getting us to see and think about the questionable in what had seemed most firm and clear—by making our life-world something suddenly unfamiliar and strange. For the most part, the movies discussed in this volume take as their subject matter the most ordinary and common of human experiences. Our cast of characters is not at all strange: newlyweds, husbands and wives struggling with the illness of their partners, sisters tending to the sickness of their siblings, mothers fighting for the future of their children, mothers mourning the death of their children, communities offering assistance to strangers, and strangers seeking to right communal wrongs. To be sure, from time to time, the end of the world or a nymphomaniac may appear, but they stand out far more for their familiarity than their foreignness—as if the apocalypse were a common family drama and nymphomania our collective nature. The chapters in this book are populated with similar characters, so intimate with us as to be entirely unseen, and ultimately monstrous in their own right: phantasms and wild tongues, the Death Drive and the Semiotic Chora, the flesh of the world and states of exception. What discomforts about these movies and philosophical investigations, what provokes thought, is that the familiar becomes very uncanny

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indeed. This is the mirror that is philosophy—that is film—that often enough provokes resistance, horror, rage, and sometimes wonder. There is a natural kinship here that makes these films informative about the nature of philosophy and makes the philosophical inquiry provoked by these films uniquely suited to engaging with them in the richest sense. It is not enough to think about the films of Lars von Trier; rather, we must think against and with them in light of the philosophical aporias they embody. This is what West Gurley accomplishes in “The Ass I Kick Today May Be the Ass I’ll Have to Kiss Tomorrow: What’s Up with the Sacrifice of Women in the Films of Lars von Trier.” Here, the question of whether we can read misogyny into the torture von Trier’s female characters undergo, or rather find ourselves provoked to investigate the nature and necessity of sacrifice in general, is powerfully asked. Might not our horror in the face of von Trier’s sacrificed heroines properly call into question the value of sacrifice itself rather than raise specters of misogynistic conceptions of the proper place of women? In Rebecca Longtin’s “Film as Phantasm: Dogville’s Cinematic Re-evaluation of Values,” a detailed analysis of von Trier’s cinematic techniques reveals a rich connection with the Stoic deconstruction of phantasm and Nietzschean perspectivism as a means of undermining and interrogating belief. Here we can clearly see filmmaking considered as a practice of philosophy. In actively calling into question the very manner in which we experience the world through cinematic technique, might film not serve both an epistemic and meta-ethical role? José Haro’s “Manderlay and the Universe of American Whiteness” demonstrates that what appears as a racist critique of liberal racial politics might also be experienced as questioning the possibility of racial justice in a system in which justice has always already been defined by a white supremacist social structure and history. Far beyond the question of an engagement with Manderlay, this problem is at the very heart of the current moment for political and ethical philosophy and praxis. In “Art and Myth: Beyond Binaries,” Susanne Claxton allows the polysemic nature of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist to reveal the inadequacy of traditional conceptions of female and male, nature and culture, emotion and reason. In doing so she demonstrates the closeness between artistic revealing and philosophical thinking. Claxton’s analysis of Antichrist is a powerful demonstration that it is the richness of artistic revealing—its inability to be reduced to one singular or final meaning—which serves to

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destabilize the binary structures with which many have attempted to shackle thought. Perhaps more directly than anyone else, Rosario Torres-Guevara engages with the effect Lars von Trier’s films have on the body of the viewer in “The Need of the Antichrist to Tame the Wild Tongue of Nosotras.” This effect is indivisible from the way in which the film Antichrist undermines society’s dismissal, dominance, and medicalization of female embodied voices and experience—reflecting both Nahua wisdom and the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. William Koch’s “Lars von Trier: Traversing the Fantasy of the Child” shows how many of von Trier’s films demonstrate that children are more often used to conceal a sense of lack in ourselves than they are valued in their own right—raising the question of what it would mean to have a sincere concern for others as more than the object of our fantasies. The book concludes, appropriately enough, with the end of the world as found in Melancholia. Timothy Holland, in “Melancholia’s End,” uses the impossibility of ever truly representing the end of the world to show the rich promise that the Humanities hold for interrogating our inability to fully engage with real world-threatening dangers such as nuclear war. In this regard, science’s own failure to motivate sufficient action in the face of global threats points to the valuable role of both artworks such as Melancholia and philosophical reflection upon them in addressing humanity’s own engagement with its potential end. In “Would It Be Bad If the Human Race Ceased to Exist? Melancholia and the Import of Human Existence,” Hans Pedersen asks whether we can, in the face of Melancholia’s seductively beautiful presentation of humanity’s death, convincingly argue that the end of humanity would be a bad thing. Beyond concern for ourselves alone, can humanity be said to add something important to the edifice of nature? Finally, Jessica Elkayam uses the rich thought of Julia Kristeva to illuminate the modalities of depression embodied by the sisters, Justine and Claire, as they face the end of the world together. More than this, however, Elkayam’s chapter reveals the insights accessible to us when we carefully listen to depression and allow it to speak as can rarely be accomplished as well as by art. This brief process of reflecting on the essays that constitute this volume should make clear that what we have engaged in is not so much philosophical reflections about the works of von Trier as philosophical investigations with, through, and against the works of von Trier. It is only in such

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an endeavor—one which takes the work of art as an impetus or demand to think beyond it in coming to terms with it—that one can honestly engage with the most challenging works. It is our hope that in this volume we have accomplished such a feat.

CHAPTER 2

The Ass I Kick Today May Be the Ass I’ll Have to Kiss Tomorrow: What’s Up with the Sacrifice of Women in the Films of Lars von Trier? S. West Gurley

Abstract  Should we refrain from watching the films of Lars von Trier as some critics, philosophers, feminists, and cultural theorists have suggested? Trier’s films and his public antics have certainly given his critics ground upon which to defend the claim that we should stop watching him. However, there are multiple depths that may be plumbed in order to understand that which his films have to offer. For instance, he may be sacrificing women for some sort of cheap thrill that may be experienced by himself and his audience; he may be deploying a kind of irony that seeks to make explicit the sacrificial treatment of woman as something written into Western cultural practices—a sordid practice that he believes ought to be stopped; he may be exorcising some of his own psychosexual demons; and he may be exploring the relationship between all these possibilities. This chapter seeks to clarify these possibilities through an examination of his trilogies and through an examination of his own public and private commentary about the issue.

S. W. Gurley (*) Department of Humanities and Philosophy, Blinn College, Brenham, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Haro, W. H. Koch (eds.), The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24918-2_2

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Keywords  Misogyny • Sacrifice • Psychoanalysis • Cultural critique • Lars von Trier Writing a chapter which concerns the treatment of women (as presented) in the films of Lars von Trier, I feel a certain illness-at-ease, a queasiness that is not unfamiliar to one who, like myself, often writes about the work of Martin Heidegger. I am no stranger to requests at conferences to defend how I am able to square myself with a thinker, particularly a thinker who has given me so much to think about with regard to authenticity, who was a Nazi. The undercurrent of such questions, as far as I can determine, is the belief that, somehow, if Philosophy can finally stop talking about work produced by Nazis and other historically significant abominations of thought and deed, we will finally have refrained from being complicit in the continuation of the essence of such horrors as occurred during the period of their power. Speaking for myself, I do not accept the assumptions that scaffold such beliefs. By the same token, I hope never to be perceived as an apologist for the heinous things initiated as the result of supporting (whether by a positive vote for or by implicit letting-be of) such horrific regimes. Now, one would justifiably imagine, given the difficulty that confronts me every time I present a paper on Heidegger at a conference where he is not the central figure concerned, which I might elect to steer clear of controversial characters, and go off to find some paragon of the moral and political high ground to play with; but, alas, I will concern myself with another enfant terrible of contemporary thought. I wonder, in the end, if this says something about me. And I hope for success in the effort of my work to demonstrate that I am looking at or forging a very narrow pathway through the work of these enfants terribles that uncovers some truth about who we privileged Westerners are, no matter how dark and terrible such truth might be to confront. While doing the press packet panel for his 2011 film, Melancholia, at the Cannes Film Festival, Lars von Trier (in a somewhat inebriated state) said, “I understand Hitler. I can sympathize with him a little bit”1 (Butler and Denny 2017, 1). Believe it or not, the condemnable utterances had only just begun at this press conference where he was accompanied by two of the women who starred in his film, Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, about and to whom von Trier said some despicably lewd and lascivious and truly embarrassing things. I will not rehearse them here. However, had Lars von Trier hoped to quell the chatter of his alleged

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“misogyny,” which had been following him around and that he most certainly had been aware of since his presentation of the character Bess in Breaking the Waves (1996), by invoking some sort of l’art pour l’art kind of defense that would thereby exonerate his personal life from the allegations, he failed miserably. In fact, his comments to the two actresses seemed, rather, to reinforce the claims that Lars von Trier hates women. This time not solely the imaginary women of his film characterizations, but in real life, in real time, with real live human beings who happened to be women. There exists a pool of resources for those who hope to make the allegations of misogyny—both in his films and in his articulated thought life—stick. For instance, in one of his earliest manifestos, von Trier says (1984), “We want to see heterosexual films, made for, about and by men. We want visibility!”2 (Bainbridge 2007, 168). And then there is the matter of his films, which I am here to think about. Please indulge me as I attempt to catalyze the discussion with an apparent divertissement. In a moment that puzzles me more and more the more I think about it, a moment from The Apology of Socrates, Socrates initiates his defense with a request that the citizens “pay no attention to my manner of speech—be it better or worse—but to concentrate your attention on whether what I say is just or not, for the excellence of a judge lies in this, as that of a speaker lies in telling the truth” (Plato 1981, 24). Many folks read over this request in light of the context in which Socrates already understands that he is up against people who have convinced the audience that there’s something important about following the protocols that they developed and codified and that now reflect how one “does things around here.” There is an established way of doing things at proceedings such as this trial that Socrates fears, having never learned the ways, will likely make him look inept. Seems like a reasonable concern. This, for Socrates, is the first thing that needs to be dealt with if he is to be successful at convincing the jury either of his innocence or of the bogus nature of the charges against him. We, instructors of Philosophy, pass over this apparently innocuous moment in Socrates’ defense routinely when we teach the Apology as if it were to be accepted because Socrates, after all, is able to discern the true from the attractively said. I approach Platonic texts with an abundant dose of suspicion that the assumptions ought to be challenged by the astute reader. In this case, the underlying assumption seems to be that the truth is detachable from its manner of presentation or its packaging. And I am not sure how one would go about verifying such an assumption. For one thing, any alternative packaging that may be offered—in this case, Socrates’ more raw

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and unrehearsed approach—for the truth may change the very truth that is being conveyed. Here, it feels as if I need to assert that the assumption seems to be that truth is not stated by, but rather indicated by, the packaging, the manner of speaking. And maybe this is true about some things like mathematical principles (a triangle is a three-sided figure, a triangle has exactly three interior angles, etc., where I have said two things about triangles that seem to indicate or call to mind a single thing, viz., a triangular figure and I can say this in multiple languages that all seem to indicate the same thing), but is this true of ALL things? If not, then what kind of things are to be excluded? And what is the truth that Socrates seeks to indicate? So many questions to ask. Whatever the case, it does seem that Socrates, by beginning in this way, works within the possibility that those who accuse him of corrupting the youth and of not believing in the gods of Athens are, by virtue of the manner in which they speak, setting up the conditions under which their accusations cannot but be seen as indicative of the truth. And Socrates hopes to dislodge their manner of speaking, presumably in order to indicate a different (perhaps even truer) truth. I am currently convinced that Lars von Trier may be understood as one who, like Kierkegaard and Socrates before him, attempts by way of the multiple layers within his films of reflection on hot button topics to communicate the truth indirectly, to communicate by gesturing toward, but never stating, the truth. A moment or two ago and a moment or two from now, I was and will be convinced also that von Trier believes (and believes that we should all notice) that truth is only ever communicated indirectly as if one can only stand in some sort of oblique or parallax relationship to truth. For the hard-nosed analytic language philosophers, I concede (as von Trier surely would) that some truths can be stated directly and unequivocally, like for instance that I gave an early version of this chapter on Thursday, March 2, 2017, and that I was in Kansas City, MO, and so forth. But, also like von Trier, I would add that we really haven’t said anything resembling the deeply significant kind of truth—the kind that leaves us wasted on the floor—that his work leads us to see, however vaguely or ephemerally we may see it. I limit my work here to discussions of some features of the following films: (1) “The Gold Heart” trilogy, from which I have viewed Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark and not The Idiots; (2) “The USA— Land of Opportunity” incomplete trilogy, from which I drew upon Dogville and Manderlay; and (3) “The Depression” trilogy, which includes Melancholia, The Antichrist, and Nymphomaniac. Some really interesting

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work could and should be done in trying to map the evolution of thought about women occasioned by the specific order in which these films were made available to the public.3 The female characters in these films share the common fate that they are sacrificed for the sake of something—a husband’s physical mobility and sex life, a child’s ability to see, a community, a rectification of a terrible injustice, a society of sane people, a force of nature, and finally a belief about women’s sexuality. In her terrific book on von Trier, Linda Badley writes: When asked the loaded question about why he makes women suffer in (and for) his films, Trier’s answer is disarmingly straightforward: ‘Those characters are not women. They are self-portraits’ [says von Trier] and his films are psychodramas in which gender roles are metaphorical projections in a role-­ playing project whose core is an urgent identity politics. Vibeke Windeløv, Trier’s producer from 1996 to 2006, offers this spin: ‘In society, women are allowed to express more, emotionally, verbally. Think how rare it is for a male in a movie to say and do all the things women say and do in Lars’ films’ (Tranceformer). Portraying himself as the victim of a kind of male repression, Trier claims to be repossessing aspects of himself that his parents had discouraged—emotions, religious yearning, Guld Hjerte itself—and that melodramatic Gold Heart Trilogy, being ‘feminine’ was therapeutic.4 (Badley 2010, 70)

Not that what the artist has to say about his own work should have any hermeneutic authority, but it does seem fruitful to explore the possibility that von Trier has some genuine insight into his “feminine” side, as he has said he explores in these films. But this is tricky business. An analysis of his films can perhaps be approached from multiple levels. First from the level of how the female character can be understood to think of her sacrifice and thereby how those people or institutions and entities think of her sacrifice; but second, one can give an analysis of the films from the standpoint of what it says about men (of particular men, e.g., von Trier) that von Trier’s presentation indicates how they perceive the woman’s sacrifice. A third layer of analysis could be done in terms of what the audience is expected to accept and how the audience is expected to respond. I am suggesting that a performative analysis could also be done in which we compare what von Trier is doing with what he is saying through these female characters who are meant to express his feminine side. Breaking the Waves is a film about a simple-minded (perhaps developmentally challenged) and devoutly religious woman named Bess, who

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marries a stout and hearty oil rig worker named Jan. Bess sees Jan as the answer to a series of prayers to God about who Bess ought to be, about how Bess ought to behave. The conversations Bess has with God are depicted within the film in two voices, Bess’ voice and Bess speaking in a deeper tone, meant to be the sound of God’s voice. The most memorable of these moments of prayer and meditation involve God’s voice chastising Bess with statements like “Bess, you are a stupid, stupid girl!” Apparently God echoes the sentiments and even the voices of the Presbyterian church elders and others in her community. Bess thinks of Jan, everything about Jan—his hunkiness, his “prick,” his manliness—as a reward for her having finally done something that God approves of. The honeymoon scene is a brutal combination of Bess’ physical pain in the loss of her virginity coupled with the presentation of Bess’ imagining that Jan is highly titillated by her pain. This commutes her experience of pain into Jan’s perception of her experiencing pleasure—the movement from expressions of pain through grimaces on Bess’ face to expressions that Jan interprets as orgasmic, euphoric rapture. Bess seems to respond by actually experiencing euphoric rapture at the sight of Jan’s titillation, and so forth. Bess at that moment begins to live, so to speak, for Jan’s physical/spiritual climax. She cannot have her jouissance until he has his. Their jouissance, in her mind, has become mutually constitutive. She believes this to be God’s gift to her. Jan eventually has to go rejoin the workforce on the oil rig off the coast of Scotland. Bess resumes her daily communiqués with God, praying that God returns Jan to her. Subsequently, Jan is involved in an accident on the rig which renders him paralyzed from the waist down and unable to work any longer. He is returned home to Bess, who, as you might imagine, assumes that this is the answer to her regrettably not-specific-enough prayer. Jan, presumably imagining that Bess loves sexual intimacy so much that she will not be able to go on, encourages Bess to have sexual encounters with other men and, presumably to make her feel less inhibited about doing so, encourages her to recount her sexual escapades to him.5 Bess interprets Jan’s titillation in response to her escapades as encouragement to continue. Eventually it becomes clear to Bess that God is making Jan’s physical condition better with every sexual encounter she has with others that she recounts to Jan. Jan makes great strides at improvement. Each sexual entanglement progressively becomes more violent and more depraved as Bess has now begun to get “tarted up” like a prostitute for each encounter. She is taunted by folks in the church and the town. Eventually she becomes persona non grata in the village for the appearances

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of impropriety that she exhibits. But she persists, putting up with the taunts, jeers, and often physical affronts made by her neighbors. She is being punished FOR her sexual escapades and BY them. But Jan’s health keeps improving and he has come to enjoy the stories of her adventures more and more. She is providing the occasion for a masturbatory fantasy for Jan. Now it seems possible that he might walk again. Bess imagines that her sexual encounters are not brutal enough (she must be punished after all for having lust and for depending so much on Jan that she prayed him into paralysis) to bring Jan all the way back to full functionality below the waist. She pays the ultimate price with her life. Six months later, Jan walks again. The diagnosis of the film is that Bess died of goodness and that her goodness was not fit for this world. Dancer in the Dark presents a different kind of sacrifice in the form of a rather poor factory worker, Selma, who happens to be going blind through some congenital defect and learns she has passed it on to her son. There exists a procedure that will prevent her son from going blind. Selma works really long hours in the factory in order to set aside most of her salary to pay for this procedure for her son. She seeks to save her son’s sight, cost what it may. Selma moves in and out of some musical fantasies that are brought about by the sounds of things, ordinary things: a dripping faucet, a tapping pen, a cough, a sneeze. The musical fantasies seem to make reference to old Hollywood musicals. Everyone around joins in the musical performance as she sings lyrics that indicate she may have gone a bit deeper into reality than most folks are able to go—or perhaps she goes further away from it than most folks dare to go. This is one of the key issues of the film. A man, her friend whom she trusts, betrays her. Because she is saving so diligently, when asked if her friend can borrow some money (his situation is pretty dire) she refuses even though it pains her to do so. He ends up arranging things so that it looks as if Selma has stolen money from his family. She ends up killing him because he begged her to, believing that his life is over, even though he never let on to anyone else that he wanted this fate. Selma ends up being tried and convicted of murder and is given the death penalty. She accepts the jury’s verdict in the knowledge that at least her son will be prevented from going blind. In this film, only women seem to be capable, though not all of them cede to doing so, of grasping her sacrifice and sympathizing with her reasons for doing it. They also are the ones who understand her need for a rich fantasy life. They help her to bring it about. The sacrificial feature of Dancer in the Dark has to do with the sacrifice a mother makes for her son. Selma operates with a singleness

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of purpose all the way to her death. Even though she notices moments of injustice along the way, she remains focused on saving her son’s sight, on saving her son from the fate that life has dealt her. Grace Mulligan (!!!) is the central figure in two of von Trier’s films: Dogville and Manderlay. In Dogville, an imaginary old mining town in Colorado that is at the dead end of what used to be an old mountain pass, is the site where Grace, being chased by gangsters—we’re left to assume that they intend to kill her—ends up trapped. Tom Edison, the resident philosopher, convinces the town folk to provide her refuge from the wolf at the door, so to speak. Grace insists upon doing something to earn her keep, not being accustomed to accepting charity, and the townspeople end up using Grace to accomplish tasks that they do not need done, but that they would like done. For instance, Grace agrees to clean the town cleaning lady’s house, to assist a blind man to admit that he is blind, and to help weed the gooseberry bushes, things that are not necessary. The town becomes dependent on having these things done. Eventually Grace is brutally raped by one of the townsmen. This marks the point in the almost four-hour story where Grace acknowledges that she is being treated as if she were property by the people who originally agreed to provide her refuge. Eventually, she becomes the town prostitute, the town scapegoat. Grace gives a speech that lets everyone know how she feels and they end up making arrangements for the gangsters, who were originally chasing her, to come to town to retrieve her. The town requests that the reward be paid to them for turning her over to them. Little did they know that Grace’s father was the crime boss who ordered the search for her. Upon hearing about his daughter’s adventure with them, and with Grace’s approval who proclaims, “this town is not worth saving; the world would be better without it,” he has everyone in town killed and the town burned to the ground. Only the town dog remains. The sacrifice here is a bit tricky. Grace came to the town seeking asylum, but came to be thought of as a gift, and then came to be thought of as a slave. After leaving Dogville with her father, Grace ends up in Alabama at the site of an existing property named Manderlay that still practices slavery, as if they never heard of the Emancipation Proclamation. Grace sacrifices her time, her money, and her self-respect to liberating the slaves from their master at Manderlay. In the process, Grace “unwittingly establishes yet another regime of power, reifying her position to that of the “one who knows.” The film exposes the hypocrisy of this situation in its apparently

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silent acceptance of her imposition of “democratic” processes within the community at Manderlay did not equate to a lack of insight into her arrogant assumption that they might not know better. On the contrary, [the character of] Willem reveals that it was he who wrote “Mam’s Law” and that he did so in order to provide a structure in which the day-to-day life of the community might continue to be functional” (Bainbridge 2007, 153). In the film Melancholia, Justine suffers from depression and is catered to and worried about by her sister Claire and husband. One of the ways to interpret the situation in this film, where Melancholia is the name of a newly discovered planet that has remained hidden behind the sun for as long as we’ve been watching the skies—a planet that is on a collision course with earth and will ultimately destroy it in a cataclysmic event—is to think of it in terms of the commonplace perception among folks who suffer from some forms of deep, clinical depression (as Justine does) that the world is coming to an end. The rest of us, those who cannot or will not allow ourselves to think such thoughts or to dwell on such thoughts as that the world is coming to an end (we all die, we all meet the same final fate), the rest of us depend upon some procedural mechanism that keeps those who suffer such low bottom depression (listen to that! “suffer”) from infecting the rest of us. We need them to be thought of as incompetent, as unable to be self-sufficient, as somehow less than we are, in order that we may enjoy the illusion that our lives are meaningful according to some standard. Justine reflects an unusual kind of sacrifice that is performed every single day by folks who suffer from depression. What happens if our illusions become shattered by something we can see coming? Can we finally say to Justine that she was right all along? I doubt it would matter to her. But we are afforded an opportunity with this film to look at the way we think about a certain segment of our society and to ask after the ripple effects of such ways of thinking. The Antichrist and the two volumes of Nymphomaniac rehearse some altogether different sets of insights about sacrifice that are well worth discussing, though there is no time here to do so. I will just quickly point out that these films take on the tasks of demonstrating how woman, as a womb in Antichrist and as a sexual object, serves at the pleasure of man in our westernized mentality. These notions will have to be developed in a different paper.

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What I’d like to say: As if Trier were thinking of some cultural archetype in the style of Adam’s rib, where a portion of Adam is taken out and away from him in order to reveal something, Trier creates female characters for the sake of reflecting something about and to himself. This is the first layer of sacrifice and is present in all of his films. If we were to stop the analysis here, we would be justified in concluding that Trier is a misogynist, though perhaps unwittingly, in that his imagination sacrifices women as if they were expendable, useful only to the extent that they help him perform an act of therapy. At the second layer, and as if he cannot be satisfied leaving the portrayal at the level of pure imagination, Trier casts serious actresses in the roles where these sacrifices (ritual sacrifices) take place. This is another, an almost fully material, layer of sacrifice portrayed in his films at the production level. Not all sacrifices are of the body. Some are of the mind. Some are of social and emotional station. Some are political. But casting women in the roles where these sacrifices are performed makes it such that the imaginary is embodied in the cinematic production. And, here again, Trier does not manage to evade the charge of misogyny since he has moved from imaginary sacrifice on paper to the sacrifice of the body of the actresses who play the female protagonists in his films. They bring the sacrifices to life in film. All of the sacrifices (whether emotional, physical, social, psychological, or political) gut us and leave us lying on the floor. Yet another layer of sacrifice emerges: the sacrifice of the audience members to the films of Lars von Trier. And this layer of sacrifice makes one wonder to what extent we should expect sacrifice to be the essential component of living a good life, all beginning from the maternal sacrifice. Perhaps, however—and it is here that I think Trier might just be able to be understood as actually calling out rather than reinforcing a misogyny that exists in our own westernized cultural imaginary, existing in the depths of our collective unconscious, supported by the various ways in which we rewrite and rehearse the economy of sacrifice in many of the things we do—Trier has turned misogyny against itself by way of the movement from personal imaginary to audience. Through the journey from script to cinematic editing, Trier has created several films that make it possible for the audience to question, perhaps even to condemn, its own institutional practices of ritualized sacrifice of woman. Hence, the attentive audience will realize something that might initiate a conversation that will conclude by making embedded misogynistic practices explicit. We might be able to bring an end to these practices. However, as audience members, we must be willing to give ourselves over to Trier’s sacrificial economy in order to achieve it. When I watch the films of Lars von Trier, I wonder what kind of mess we’ve made of things and what we may ever do to set things right. We surely would have to begin with the possibility that sacrifice is rarely a good thing and should only be exalted in the particular, never in the universal.

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Notes 1. Cited from the press conference at Cannes, 2011, in Butler and Denny (2017). 2. Lars von Trier, Manifesto 1 (released to accompany The Elements of Crime), reproduced in Bainbridge (2007). 3. My sense is that an evolution in thought can be gleaned from and within the order in which I have articulated them here, but it is noteworthy that The Antichrist was released two years before Melancholia. 4. Badley (2010) excerpting from the film Tranceformer—a Portrait of Lars von Trier (1997) and Thomas (2004). 5. I am aware here of a departure from Zizek’s account according to which Jan, in making the request that Bess have sex with other men and give a report after each occurrence, is taken to be already aware that the effect of such reports will be to “keep awake his will to live” (Zizek 2013). On my account, it seems a much more complicated affair in which Jan’s “will to live” is integrally intertwined with Bess’ perceived jouissance at sexual encounters. It appears to me that Jan, foolishly and yet typically, has interpreted his introduction of sexual jouissance into Bess’ cache of desires as his having performed some sort of spiritual task, ushering Bess beyond her womanly limitations of modesty and prudence.

References Badley, Linda. 2010. Lars von Trier. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Bainbridge, Caroline. 2007. The Cinema of Lars von Trier: Authenticity and Artifice. London: Wallflower Press. Butler, Rex, and David Denny. 2017. Introduction: The Feminine Act and the Question of Women in Lars von Trier’s Films. In Lars von Trier’s Women. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Plato. 1981. Apology. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Thomas, Dana. 2004. Meet the Punisher: Lars von Trier Devastates Audiences— and Actresses. Interview with Lars von Trier. Newsweek, April 5. Zizek, Slavoj. 2013. Femininity Between Goodness and Act. The Symptom 14. http://www.lacan.com/symptom14/feminimity-between.html.

CHAPTER 3

Film as Phantasm: Dogville’s Cinematic Re-evaluation of Values Rebecca A. Longtin

Abstract  This chapter interprets von Trier’s Dogville as a suspension of belief that provokes a re-evaluation of contemporary moral values. Reading Dogville through the Stoic concept of phantasms and Nietzsche’s perspectivism, I analyze the plot and visual techniques as revealing how we form, evaluate, and re-evaluate our beliefs based on changing impressions and shifting perspectives. The philosophy of the Stoics and Nietzsche and the visual techniques of Dogville demonstrate that the recognition of the artificiality of appearances serves a moral purpose by forcing us to examine our beliefs more deeply. In this way, von Trier presents film as a powerful art form for suspending and evaluating how we see and understand the world. Keywords  Dogville • Nietzsche • Phantasm • Perspectivism • Stoic ethics • Lars von Trier Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003) seems to defy the very idea of cinema—in particular, the realism of this artistic medium. At its birth, film was seen as more of a technological marvel than an art because of its ability to ­replicate R. A. Longtin (*) Department of Philosophy, State University of New York, New Paltz, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Haro, W. H. Koch (eds.), The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24918-2_3

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the reality of our everyday audio-visual experience. Before its artistic capacity was discovered, film was a curiosity, a way of capturing and projecting an event from one time and space to another. Eventually the realism of film became a powerful tool for story-telling due to its ability to transport and immerse us in an experiential world. Unlike a painting, with cinema, we sit in darkened theaters and stare at a screen as though it is a portal into another reality. From its beginning, film has blurred the distinction between reality and illusion. By contrast, Dogville is a film that continually gestures toward its fictional and illusory qualities. In the style of black box theater, the film unfolds on a bare sound stage with chalk outlines to designate buildings and other features of the town. This minimalist style requires actors to move through spaces where there are no real boundaries and to handle objects that are not really there. Instead of immersing us in a realistic space, the set always appears as a set. Von Trier never lets his audience forget that we are viewing fictional events. We, the audience, do not have the opportunity to suspend disbelief and lose ourselves in the reality of the film because they always appear as a performance being presented to us through cinematic images. Yet despite the fact that none of the images appear as real, Dogville still achieves a real and forceful affective response. At times, von Trier’s minimalist style even intensifies our emotional responses—a surprising effect multiple scholars have analyzed. Tarja Laine describes how the minimalist set of Dogville sets up spatial relations that magnify social dynamics, which allows viewers to focus more deeply on intersubjective relations and place themselves within the events (Laine 2006, 132). Robert Sinnerbrink notes that von Trier’s style adopts Brecht’s distancing effect but reverses its sense of alienation by using emotion rather than eliminating it (Sinnerbrink 2007, 4). While others have examined the cinematic style of Dogville as a method of intensifying emotional responses and questioning social, political, moral, and theological ideologies (Rancière 2010; Nobus 2007), this chapter will argue that von Trier upends our visual suspension of disbelief in order to examine the very nature of belief. That is, von Trier’s techniques reveal how we form, evaluate, and re-evaluate our beliefs based on changing impressions and shifting perspectives. Using Nietzsche’s revision of Stoic philosophy as a lens for interpreting the film, I will argue that the recognition of the artificiality of how things appear to us serves a moral purpose. Specifically, I will compare the style of Dogville to the Stoic concept of phantasms and to Nietzsche’s perspectivism. For the Stoics, we

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never experience reality itself. Instead, sensory perceptions are always impressions of how things appear, or phantasms, and not the way things are in reality. Along similar lines, Nietzsche sees all ideas and beliefs as perspectives, appearances without an underlying reality, which can change and be transformed. Both the Stoics and Nietzsche emphasize the contingency of appearances in order to re-evaluate values. In content and style, Dogville enacts a similar re-evaluation of values, especially the value of compassion. For this reason, von Trier presents film as a powerful art form for suspending and evaluating how we see and understand the world, which makes it the perfect medium for moral provocations aimed at self-examination.

The Destruction of Moral Belief in Dogville Dogville plays with belief on multiple levels. In addition to the style of the film, the plot questions the possibility of belief in religion, ethics, philosophy, and any system of belief, rational or otherwise. As Dany Nobus explains, von Trier provokes “a serious re-consideration of the notions of acceptance, tolerance, hospitality and solidarity … central principles of a democratic society” (Nobus 2007, 25). The film questions beliefs that form the very foundation of contemporary society, and in particular, the ideals of human progress and social justice that underlie the United States’ vision of itself as a city upon a hill. Moreover, the problem of belief—that beliefs are never certain and always open to re-interpretation—is central to the film. Von Trier undermines belief first through symbols of nihilism that evoke the decay of moral values. The plot unfolds in Dogville, a very small town in the Rocky Mountains, during the Great Depression. The town of Dogville has no priest or minister and no police or law-keepers. The vacant mission house is an emblem for the death of God. The abandoned silver mine forms the boundary of the town, and a sign above its entrance reads “dictum ac factum,” a phrase that emphasizes the integrity of doing exactly what one says. In the town of Dogville, this connection between what is said and done, between belief and action, is as abandoned as the silver mine. Additionally, there are multiple references to the sound of the pile drivers in the valley below, which indicates a new penitentiary being built—the birth of a prison. For a contemporary audience viewing this film in 2003, this sound foreshadows the current problems of the US justice system—namely, the prison-industrial complex, the growth of

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f­ or-­profit prisons, and the rise of mass incarceration. Everything about the town of Dogville suggests the frailty of morality and the conditional nature of justice. Beyond this heavy-handed symbolism, von Trier makes moral belief a concrete and deeply troubling problem, rather than a merely theoretical one, in the development of the characters Tom and Grace. These characters embody the real consequences of the problem of belief. The main character, Tom, is a self-proclaimed moral philosopher who sees himself busy “mining” into the human soul. Yet Tom’s efforts to “scourge and purge” the human soul lead nowhere. Despite an over-inflated estimation of his own ideas, Tom is unable to write anything and instead gives a series of unwelcome lectures on “moral rearmament” that are meant to benefit the community, even though the townspeople vocally disregard his ideas. Unlike other townspeople, Tom does not need to work since he can live off of his father’s pension. Not only is Tom presented as a useless person who does not contribute to the town and is not taken seriously, he judges everyone from a position of privilege and leisure. It is this position that allows him time to sit and think about human nature and moral issues. Yet his privilege also distances him from others. Von Trier’s fictional moral philosopher hardly seems up to the task of understanding human nature, and his naiveté about human nature in general, and the townspeople in particular, is what drives the plot forward to its violent and devastating ending in which the entire town and all its inhabitants are destroyed. Throughout the film the very idea of moral philosophy is in question. At the beginning of the plot, Tom’s main insight is that people lack an “attitude of openness” and do not know how to accept a gift. Tom’s desired method of teaching is by way of illustration, but he has no examples to prove his point. The town is very poor. There are no gifts, only poverty and want. Then a gift appears in the form of Grace, a beautiful woman who appears in Dogville late at night fleeing on foot from gangsters. Tom discovers Grace, takes her into his care, and gets the reluctant townspeople to allow her to hide in their town by offering her as a gift. Grace gains favor in the town through thoughtful services that make the townspeople’s lives easier and more pleasant. She becomes beloved by everyone. Yet her relationship with the town deteriorates into slavery over the course of the plot. Her once superfluous gifts become labor, expected work that can be compensated with wages and later exploited by force and manipulation.1 When “Wanted” posters appear with false accusations against Grace, the townspeople decide that her presence in Dogville is

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more “costly” and that they need a “counter-balance.” This shift in power leads to a very different relationship between Grace and the town. Slowly, each townsperson finds a way to use her: dominating over her with unjust demands, humiliating her with cruelty, and subjecting her to sexual violence. Even the children understand Grace’s place within their community and join in coercing and bullying her. By the end of the film, Grace’s suffering at the hands of the townspeople becomes unbearable. After a failed attempt to escape, the townspeople put an iron collar around her neck and chain her to the heavy flywheel of the old mill to ensure she cannot run away. Her collar, chain, and wheel are images that evoke both slavery and martyrdom. This act of maliciousness is particularly painful and horrifying, as Grace had once been celebrated and loved by the same people who abuse her—and not through any change in her character or actions, but only due to her vulnerability, her need for protection. This transformation in the relation between the townspeople and Grace seems to indicate how circumstantial morality and justice are. Given the right circumstances, given the power, would we all inflict harm on others and commit such cruel acts? Grace explicitly asks herself this question in the final scene of the film before deciding the fate of Dogville. The dramatic narrative of the film hangs on this very question, and yet its answer is not quite clear. The plot not only emphasizes the conditional nature of moral action, it questions the means by which we decide what is moral. The character Tom presents us with the failure of moral philosophy to understand human nature or to guide action. At best, he demonstrates the uselessness of theory and, at worst, its dangers. He convinces the town to accept Grace as a fugitive with the ulterior motive of using her as an illustration of his theories. He then fails to prevent the town from exploiting her once they discover her vulnerability. Finally, Tom turns against Grace out of frustration and embarrassment when she sexually rejects him. It is Tom who hands Grace over to the gangsters from whom he saved her in the beginning. Yet he manages to justify his self-interested action as necessary to uphold his ethics thanks to a long process of rationalization, which is clearly a superficial guise for his cowardice and sexual frustration. Despite Tom’s romantic relationship with Grace, despite having been in love with her, he theorizes himself out of any responsibility to her and even justifies an action that he expects will end her life. Simply put, he uses ethics to justify his unethical action. In the end, the moral philosopher ends up committing the worst offense and the deepest betrayal.

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If Tom presents us with the failure of moral philosophy to cultivate a system of belief that improves human life and relationships, the character of Grace presents us with the failure of Christian morality and its remnants in secular ethics and neoliberal democratic principles. Throughout the plot, Grace accepts the townspeople’s moral weaknesses with compassion and forgiveness. From her perspective, they should not be blamed for their xenophobic distrust or unwillingness to help. They are poor and come from different circumstances than her. At the beginning of the film, Grace’s attitude and actions seem completely justified. Moreover, her humble attitude and service to the town create a happier community with stronger ties between people. Grace initially appears as a shining beacon of hope that transforms the town of Dogville with her compassion. Yet as the plot develops, these very same moral qualities become a disastrous liability, especially when Grace willingly accepts abuse. As her relationship with the town falls into exploited labor and then slavery, Grace continually shows sympathy for those who harm her. She excuses their maliciousness by trying to understand their motivations and how their circumstances have contributed to their actions. She even feels pity for the men who rape her. By the end of the plot, Grace’s forgiveness becomes unbearable for the audience. In her collar and chains, she becomes an image of martyrdom that evokes disgust. Von Trier makes Grace a Christ-like figure whose self-­ sacrifice is unbearable. The audience requires some relief from the pain we feel with her plight, and von Trier delivers one that unsettles us as deeply as possible.

Dogville’s Moral Aporia and the Re-evaluation of Compassion The ending of Dogville challenges Grace’s ethics of compassion and pity and, in doing so, creates a troubling moral aporia. After Tom betrays Grace and the gangsters arrive, the audience expects her to be killed. Instead, Grace is freed from her chains and enters the car of the boss, who is revealed to be her father. Within the car, an intense moral debate unfolds. We learn that the daughter refused to follow in her father’s footsteps as a leader of organized crime, a system of justice that operates through force and demands an eye for an eye. Grace bluntly expresses disgust for her father’s violent way of life, which she calls arrogant. Grace’s father, however, turns this criticism against her and describes her compassion as a

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hypocritical form of arrogance that refuses to see itself as such: “you do not pass judgment, because you sympathize with them. A deprived childhood, and a homicide really isn’t necessarily a homicide, right? The only thing you can blame is circumstances—rapists and murderers may be the victims according to you.” Her father then calls her arrogant because she forgives others with excuses she would never permit for herself. He argues that her mercy is not an act of kindness but instead subordinates others by judging them as less than her. This intense debate instigates a sudden and unexpected reversal of values. At first, Grace opposes her father’s position and maintains her sympathy for those who abused her, but after more thought it dawns on her, as the omniscient narrator states, that, “if she had acted like them, she could not have defended a single one of her actions and could not have condemned them harshly enough.” She then realizes that she has a “duty” to punish them. Grace’s previous belief system of pity becomes untenable. The harm the people of Dogville inflicted on her demands judgment. She stops making excuses for Dogville and decides to destroy it by ordering the gangsters to shoot everyone and to burn the town to the ground. People who were especially cruel to her receive punishments that mirror their actions against her. Grace herself kills Tom with a gun to the back of his head at pointblank range. These actions, however, are not presented as personally satisfying revenge. Instead, Grace acts as if she has a moral imperative to destroy the town and uses phrases like “I owe her that” and “I think it’s appropriate.” She adopts violence as a tool of justice to prevent the town of Dogville from harming another person. This ending is at once deeply satisfying and deeply horrifying. Not only is Grace’s sudden turn from martyrdom to violence jarring, the emotional response of the audience is startling. Von Trier makes Grace’s abuse and humiliation so uncomfortable that we revel in the ending when justice is finally served. We, as the audience, feel relief and pleasure as the people of Dogville die in a fiery blaze. This destruction is cathartic in the sense that it resolves the dramatic tension of the plot. The ending feels necessary even in all its violence. Yet despite the resolution, the violence of her actions is still troubling. Von Trier manipulates us to empathize with a character who destroys an entire town, including the children, elderly, and disabled. The horror at this realization forces us into a state of moral aporia. We do not know what to think or feel. In this way, Dogville critiques systems of belief without offering a clear alternative. At the same time, the events of Dogville and its dramatic

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e­ nding demand that we make judgments, even without an objective system or set of standards. Grace’s father criticizes her for failing to pass judgment on those who exploit and abuse her. The ending’s dramatic tension rests on both the necessity of moral action and the fallibility of moral belief. It is a difficult position: we must act according to what we deem is right, yet we must act without the reassurance of undeniable justifications. These two demands reflect the same tension in Nietzsche’s re-evaluation of values and his treatment of belief in general. In questioning what most would consider moral virtues—empathy, compassion, and pity—Dogville unsettles our moral frameworks and provokes us in a way that is similar to the Stoics and Nietzsche. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche poses his aphorisms as a polemic aimed at morality that values pity and self-sacrifice. For Nietzsche, this moral attitude is based upon a “fundamental mistrust” of the world and “corrosive skepticism” (Nietzsche 1989b, Preface §5, 19). Nietzsche describes pity as nausea that turns away from earthly life (Nietzsche 1989b, II: 7). Since pity is self-denying, it is life-denying. It is a danger to humanity because it expresses the will against life, a symptom of the ultimate disease, nihilism. This morality of pity, or “self-torture” as Nietzsche describes it, runs against sense, instinct, and nature because it is hostile to life and slanders the world (Nietzsche 1989b, II: 24). It is important to note, however, that Nietzsche derives his critique of pity from reading the Stoics, which indicates similar moral concerns guiding it. As Martha Nussbaum argues, Nietzsche’s criticism of pity is not rooted in cruelty but is meant to be “a revival of Stoic values of self-­ command and self-formation within a post-Christian and post-Romantic context” (Nussbaum 1994, 140). Nietzsche carefully studied Epictetus and Seneca and refers to Stoicism frequently in his writings—both in praise and in critique—and even refers to himself as the last Stoic (Nietzsche 1989a, §227, 155). His critique of pity is especially Stoic. Ancient Stoicism rejects pity, because it accepts that only virtue brings happiness, not external goods. Virtue is an internal good that everyone has power over through the exercise of reason and will, whereas external goods are subject to fortune and chance. Thus, the goods that contribute to a happy life are not susceptible to misfortune. As such, pity has “a false cognitive structure” insofar as it gives importance to things and events that are unimportant (Nussbaum 1994, 144). For the Stoic, pity insults the dignity of the person who is pitied, because it assumes that the person is not virtuous or self-commanding and instead weak enough to value unimportant things

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of the world. Nietzsche asserts that “To offer pity is as good as to offer contempt” (Nietzsche 1997, 135). Rather than showing kindness toward another, pity reveals a lowly estimation of who they are. Like Grace’s father, the Stoics and Nietzsche argue that pity is condescension in disguise. Nietzsche’s philosophy confronts the false consciousness of pity in the same way that Grace’s father reveals the arrogance of her compassion. Within the film, Grace’s pity for the townspeople occasions their cruel exploitation of her. Rather than fighting or resisting, she makes excuses for their actions. Grace’s acceptance of their cruelty appears almost hyperbolic, especially when she undergoes such bodily and psychological harm. Her merciful exonerations of her rapists throw the limits of pity into sharp relief. Why would anyone want to empathize with someone who would dehumanize them to such a degree? How does such forgiveness benefit anyone? This self-sacrifice is not a moral value, but a denial of the value of one’s life.2 Nietzsche would describe Grace’s forgiveness as life-denying nihilism in the disguise of virtue. This disguise, however, wears out over the course of the film and reveals its flaws. By the end of Dogville, Grace’s mercy for the townspeople no longer seems reasonable but instead has jeopardized her selfhood at fundamental levels by putting the needs and feelings of everyone before her own until she is completely diminished. Von Trier exaggerates her compassion to the point that we respond with revulsion. We feel the life-denying aspects of her pity as a wave of nausea. The moral questions that arise in the film thus reflect the same critique of pity in Nietzsche and the Stoics. Pity and compassion are not a sufficient basis for moral action and can even signal complacency in the face of grave injustice. Dogville, like Nietzsche’s critique of traditional morality, makes us question the value of our moral values for life. We are forced to confront our ideas of good and evil from a different perspective, one that turns everything on its head and uproots our deepest assumptions about the world. Just as Nietzsche’s philosophy was meant to destroy the life-­ denying delusions of modernity to clear the ground for a morality that could affirm life, so von Trier forces us to confront the problematic assumption that people are merely the product of their environment and cannot be blamed for their actions. Nietzsche’s and von Trier’s critiques of pity are provocations aimed at a critical re-examination of our moral beliefs and the ways that they might fail to promote genuine equality and human flourishing.

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The Optics of Belief These comparisons between Dogville’s and Nietzsche’s provocations become even more striking when we turn to the formal qualities of the film. The cinematic techniques and style of the film performatively undermine belief by drawing our attention to the conditional nature of perception. In style and content, Dogville examines how we form beliefs when perception is unreliable and perspectives can shift, a question that was central for the Stoics and for Nietzsche. In ancient Stoicism, belief is based upon phantasms, impressions that strike the mind. Through reason and will we can either assent or dissent to phantasms. In other words, we can suspend our immediate acceptance of how things appear in order to evaluate the phantasm and accept it as true or as false. Action, moral choice, and belief all proceed from this structure of assent and dissent to phantasms. Stoics emphasize that the purpose of reason is “to make a proper use of impressions” and that “the first and greatest task of a philosopher is to put impressions to the test … and not admit any that has not been tested” (Epictetus 1995, 48, 49). This Stoic practice of evaluating phantasms is significant because it recognizes the gap between how things appear and how they are in reality, especially since phantasms are so contingent. As Epictetus describes, “The soul is like a vessel filled with water; and impressions are like a ray of light that falls upon the water. If the water is disturbed the ray will seem to be disturbed likewise, though in reality it is not” (Epictetus 1995, 158). All our impressions of reality are as ephemeral as the play of light on water—ever shifting and never stable. Thus phantasms pose questions to us and should not be taken at face value. The difficulty is that most people do not take up this important task and tend to accept appearances without reflection. We tend to assent to what appears as true and dissent to what appears as false, which may be independent of how things are in reality. For this reason, the evaluation of impressions requires careful practice. As Epictetus explains, you must “set thoughts against your impression” to “overpower it, and not be swept away by it” (Epictetus 1995, 121). Like the Stoics, Nietzsche believes all we experience are appearances. Unlike the Stoics, for Nietzsche, this idea does not necessitate an underlying reality. His philosophy radicalizes the Stoic concept of phantasms by collapsing the distinction between appearances and reality. Nietzsche also emphasizes the evaluation of impressions in his approach to morality, which he sets up as a problem of

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optics when he calls Judeo-Christian morals a “disease of the eye” (Nietzsche 1967a, 191). Dogville involves the suspension of judgment in a way that performs an evaluation of phantasms. The aporetic ending of Dogville is significant because it provides conflicting impressions of right and wrong. From one perspective, pity is morally good and violence wrong. From another perspective, violence is morally good and pity wrong. Instead of presenting morality in only one particular way, Dogville demands that we examine these conflicting impressions of moral judgment and decide for ourselves. Dogville deconstructs belief and demands belief without providing an answer so that the burden of resolution lies with us, the viewer. The lack of resolution at the end reflects the nature of how we form moral beliefs. Von Trier, more importantly, emphasizes the changing of perspective in moral reasoning through his use of light. The narrator notes a small change in the light over Dogville twice in the film: at the beginning when Grace first arrives and at the end when she decides to destroy the town. At the beginning of the film, the narrator notes a slight change of light as Grace realizes the town is watching her with distrust as a suspicious outsider. At the end of the film, after a long period of viewing things from their perspective, her attitude toward the town is altered in the moonlight. As the narrator describes, “It was as if the light previously so merciful and faint, finally refused to cover up for the town any longer … The light now penetrated every unevenness and flaw in the buildings, and in the people.” The changes of light that alter her vision of the town express the conditional nature of belief. We can always see things differently. We can always shift perspective. More importantly, events and circumstances can shed light on a situation in a way that forces us to see it differently. Our moral judgments always take place under specific contingencies, changing circumstances, and partial understandings of matters. Von Trier, like the Stoics and Nietzsche, recognizes this very important aspect of moral belief: our judgments are always based on appearances, and appearances are not stable or certain. Dogville’s cinematic style also acts as an evaluation of phantasms insofar as it emphasizes the fictional nature of appearances. While every film consists of appearances and viewers commonly understand the difference between the fictional images of cinema and the real world of everyday experience, von Trier exaggerates the fictional qualities of film. With Dogville, we are constantly aware that it is merely staged events. The town never appears as a real town, only the sketch of a town. The actors move

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through this space according to imaginary rules of its fictional geography. The audience feels the absence of a real place and real objects in a way that other films cover up with sets and props. Each scene of Dogville appears as a mere appearance that is open to interpretation. This technique not only suggests the ephemerality of all beliefs it also surprises us with how it still achieves real effects. Despite the palpable falseness of what we see, we still have strong emotional reactions to these events. The minimalism of the set even magnifies our affective responses at time. The first time Grace is raped by Chuck, the absence of walls allows us to see the townspeople walking by outside oblivious to the atrocity of what is happening inside. This violation, hidden in one sense and in plain sight in another, allows us to visualize the complacency of the townspeople in a stark and horrifying way.3 There is a very raw and real quality to this style, which surprises us because of its obvious artificiality. Through fiction, von Trier illustrates something about our lived reality and the fictions that form our real world. Von Trier, like Nietzsche, suggests that fictions have reality since reality is created from fictions. The Nietzschean resonances of von Trier’s style become more evident if we examine the relation between perspectivism and moral belief. In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche’s re-evaluation of values is framed in terms of perspectivism. He states that the idea of an objective perspective is a “nonsensical absurdity” and we should instead attempt to “employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations” (Nietzsche 1989b, III: 12). In The Will to Power, Nietzsche describes perspectivism by explaining that all knowledge is interpretation and thus has “no meaning behind it, but countless meanings” (Nietzsche 1967b, §481, 267). These multiple interpretations reflect the needs and drives of our lives, which are circumstantial and subjective, not universal and unchanging. For Nietzsche there is no absolute truth; only fictional truths that give value to life and in doing so help us to live. All ideas are thus “provisional assumptions” (Nietzsche 1967b, §497). This contingency and groundlessness, however, reflect the very thing that Nietzsche wants to guide moral values: life. Life has no fixed nature but instead evolves to different challenges and situations posed by a given time and place. A value that is life-affirming will always look different from time to time and place to place. For this reason, forming life-affirming moral values requires the ability to shift one’s perspective. Dogville explores this uncertain and shifting nature of perspective cinematically. Von Trier shifts between two contrasting methods of filming

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and editing: (1) discontinuous shots filmed with a handheld camera and edited with jump cuts, and (2) overhead shots filmed with a crane. With this first technique, we are immersed in the action and are at eye level with the characters within the film. Von Trier captures interactions between characters with a handheld camera, which records the slight hand tremors, shifting weight, and breath of the operator so that the perspective feels embodied and subjective. To add to this realism, von Trier had the actors perform for extended periods of time and lose themselves in the action and roles, rather than continually cutting the action and setting up a new camera angle. This technique, however, changes the editing process. Without spatial and temporal continuity between takes, von Trier must use jump cuts between shots within a scene. The wavering images of the handheld camera along with the jump cuts give the film a rough, unpolished feel. Points-of-view shift continually and force us to reorient ourselves as viewers. This method contrasts with continuity editing, which seamlessly moves from perspective to perspective to give an uninterrupted sense of space and time. Von Trier’s method, however, presents the falsity of continuity editing. Continuity editing requires a transformation of space and time that is possible only within the medium of film and not possible in our ordinary experience. Yet continuity editing makes a viewer lose oneself in the experience of the film so that it feels real. Continuity editing covers over its artificiality. In this sense, von Trier’s method of filming long takes and assembling scenes with jump cuts is truer to experience because he cannot shift perspective without us becoming aware of the shift. He cannot jump from one moment in time to another without our awareness of this leap. This technique means we are keenly aware that film is an assemblage of images, not a complete whole. Yet despite the inability to immerse ourselves in this world wholly, there is something truthful about this technique because of how it treats our human perspective. The jump cuts draw our attention to how we see and not simply what we see. Von Trier uses a second technique that draws further attention to the nature of perspective. These shaky, discontinuous shots contrast dramatically with the overhead shots filmed by a crane. From the God’s eye view of the camera crane, we can see the outlines of the buildings of Dogville that are drawn on the sound stage. From this perspective, we can view the town as a whole and see its layout like a map, which gives a sense of order. These overhead shots correspond to the voiceovers of the omniscient third-person narrator’s explanations of the story. At times von Trier adds

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superimposed images to give even more information, like a chapter title or demarcations that indicate the movements of the actors over time. These shots and voiceovers mean that Dogville unfolds in a very literary way like a novel. In contrast to the jump cuts of individual scenes, the overarching story-telling device is highly organized and structured. Von Trier thus not only utilizes two modes of filming and editing, he adopts two contrasting techniques of story-telling that give us very different impressions: (1) a subjective and changing perspective that disorients us, and (2) a privileged vantage point that provides structure and clarity.4 These visual cues expose the conflicting undercurrents within the film: the conflict between the impossibility of moral objectivity with the jump cuts and the demand for moral judgment with the overhead shots and an omniscient third-­ person narrator. This dramatic shift from one viewpoint to another makes us aware of perspective and also mirrors what moral judgment is like in life. When we find ourselves entangled in moral confusion, we often step back to find some critical distance and gain clarity. This is not to say that we can be completely objective or find a perspective of absolute truth, both of which are impossible. Even within the film, the critical distance of the narrator is finite because there is no absolute vantage point to observe the story. As humans, we can never remove ourselves completely from the time or place that shapes our perspective. All perspectives remain perspectives. Von Trier’s use of different perspectives does not resolve moral relativism but instead connects it to the problem of optics. All of these visual aspects draw our attention to how perspectives can be shifted or radically transformed. We continually take in images, make sense of them, and assemble them into a narrative that is imbued with our desires, fears, values, and illusions. Perspectivism highlights the challenge to moral theory: to figure out the right thing to do in a world where nothing is certain. When faced with the fact that moral values are illusions with no stable basis, our beliefs evaporate into the ether. Yet we cannot live without the illusion of value. When ultimate oughts disappear, the question becomes what values we want to create and to what end. This task, however, presents a challenge that is difficult to confront. How do we build a new system of belief if there is no stable foundation? The moral aporia at the end of Dogville poses this very challenge. Like Nietzsche, Dogville questions all our beliefs without providing a clear answer. At the same time, Nietzsche and Dogville both assert the necessity of acting. Our moral reasoning lacks a firm basis,

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yet we must still act. Beliefs guide our actions even though we are always in the process of forming them and revising them. A complete system of morality that is universal, eternal, and unchanging is impossible. If morality is to serve life and life is always changing, morality becomes a process of continual revision. To live is to change, and morality must have the same adaptability. Like Penelope’s weaving, the web of belief must be continually woven anew, undone and redone. To this end, provocative films like Dogville serve a vital purpose by unsettling moral frameworks that have grown untenable.5

Cinematic Phantasms Dogville troubles and shakes our belief systems to the core. It is clearly a polemic against the ideals and principles that guide contemporary society. The film, moreover, does so in a way that reveals why beliefs lack stability and are subject to sudden shifts. Dogville draws attention to the gap between appearances and reality, which leaves a space that demands evaluation of not only what we believe but also how we form those beliefs. I have argued that this polemic is a way of re-evaluating moral values in the vein of the Stoics and Nietzsche. This re-evaluation of morals, moreover, involves more than the plot, themes, character development, or symbolism of the film. Von Trier plays with belief at the material and experiential level. In this way, Dogville presents us with film as the medium where our beliefs can be projected and suspended for us to reflect upon them from a distance, but without them being removed from their concrete, personal, and affective dimensions. We gain reflective distance that allows us to question and transform what we believe, but this distance does not strip away the experiential or affective dimensions of our everyday experience. Film thus allows reflective distance without abstraction or disinterested contemplation. Film has the power to question our deeply held assumptions about the world and to shift our perspectives. This power is not necessarily in its realism, however, as von Trier shows us, but in its ability to reveal how we see the world. We do not see the world as it really is. We always see the world as a fiction, as a phantasm. Cinematic images strike us in a way that is similar to our everyday sensory experience, but with film we are aware of its fictional nature. By showing us the strength of our affective and intellectual responses to blatantly artificial images, von Trier asserts the reality of fiction. Von Trier thus harnesses the power of cinema to show us that all

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beliefs are merely beliefs. In doing so, he develops a powerful optics of belief that—if we think like the Stoics or Nietzsche—can transform our moral values in ways that truly serve life.

Notes 1. The concept of the gift is also important for understanding the social, political, theological, and ethical questions at stake in Dogville. See Nobus (2007), Chiesa (2007), and Bradatan (2009). 2. Nietzsche’s critiques of altruism and self-sacrifice are also relevant for understanding why he rejects compassion as the basis for ethics. See Janaway (2007) and Reginster (2000). 3. For analyses of von Trier’s depictions of the sexual abuse of women in his films and how they challenge patriarchy, misogyny, and gender, see Bainbridge (2004), Marso (2016), and Galt (2016). 4. There is much more to say about the two contrasting types of filming and editing techniques von Trier uses in Dogville. As Francesco Casetti explains, film continually negotiates between conflicting types of the gaze, for example, between the partial gaze of point-of-view and the totality of world that is given in movement and editing, between the penetrating gaze of the camera’s enhanced vision and the uniquely human gaze of cinema that is always anthropomorphic. Film is at once fantastical and real, fragmented and whole, immersive and distant. Casetti describes film as “an ever inventive synthesis of gazes that strived to bring about true compromises without ever sacrificing the complexity of contradiction” (Casetti 2008, 4). 5. While my chapter argues von Trier’s provocations can serve an ethical purpose, I do not address the controversies surrounding his work. Mette Hjort looks at the dangers of von Trier’s provocations not only in his films but also in his words and behavior off-screen and their real-world effects (Hjort 2013).

References Bainbridge, Caroline. 2004. The Trauma Debate: Just Looking? Traumatic Affect, Film Form and Spectatorship in the Work of Lars von Trier. Screen 45 (4): 391–400. Bradatan, Costica. 2009. ’I Was a Stranger, and Ye Took Me Not In’: Deus Ludens and Theology of Hospitality in Lars von Trier’s Dogville. Journal of European Studies 39: 58–78. Casetti, Francesco. 2008. Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Chiesa, Lorenzo. 2007. What Is the Gift of Grace? On Dogville. Film-­ Philosophy 11: 1–22. Dogville. 2003. Written and Directed by Lars von Trier. Denmark: Filmek AB. Epictetus. 1995. The Discourses of Epictetus – The Handbook – Fragments. Trans. Robin Hard. New York: Everyman. Galt, Rosalind. 2016. The Suffering Spectator? Perversion and Complicity in Antichrist and Nymphomaniac. In Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier, ed. Bonnie Honig and Lori J.  Marso, 71–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hjort, Mette. 2013. The Problem with Provocation: On Lars von Trier, Enfant Terrible of Danish Art Film. Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media 36: 5–29. Janaway, Christopher. 2007. Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laine, Tarja. 2006. Lars von Trier, Dogville and the Hodological Space of Cinema. Studies in European Cinema 3 (2): 129–141. Marso, Lori J. 2016. Must We Burn Lars von Trier? Simone de Beauvoir’s Body Politics in Antichrist. In Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier, ed. Bonnie Honig and Lori J. Marso, 45–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967a. The Case of Wagner in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1967b. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1989a. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New  York: Vintage Books. ———. 1989b. On the Genealogy of Morals in Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1997. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nobus, Dany. 2007. The Politics of Gift-Giving and the Provocation of Lars von Trier’s Dogville. Film-Philosophy 11 (3): 23–37. Nussbaum, Martha. 1994. Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism. In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht, 139–167. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury. Reginster, Bernard. 2000. Nietzsche’s ‘Revaluation’ of Altruism. Nietzsche-Studien 29 (1): 199–219. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2007. Grace and Violence: Questioning Politics and Desire in Lars von Trier’s Dogville. SCAN: Journal of Media Arts Culture 4 (2): 1–7. http:// scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=94. Accessed 6 Jan 2019.

CHAPTER 4

Manderlay and the Universe of American Whiteness José A. Haro

Abstract  This chapter discusses Lars von Trier’s Manderlay and what he exposes about race in the United States. What seems like an uninteresting critique of white, American liberalism really gets to the heart of the all-­ encompassing aspect of whiteness that permeates the drama and by extension the culture of the United States. This meditation reflects upon this thesis by examining several aspects of the film including the stage set and lighting, the storyline, the plot, the main protagonist’s liberalism and fetishization of black experience and bodies, and the denouement. In the end, what von Trier reveals in Manderlay is a white universe of the United States that is foundational, ordering, perpetual, and irrepressible even as it seems to have disappeared or receded into the background going seemingly unnoticed. Keywords  Lars von Trier • Manderlay • Race • Whiteness • Emancipation

J. A. Haro (*) Department of Social Sciences, Human Services and Criminal Justice, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Haro, W. H. Koch (eds.), The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24918-2_4

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When I first thought about Lars von Trier’s film Manderlay (2005), it did not immediately call forth some philosophical significance. In fact, I didn’t have much to say or offer. I then went to the critics to see if I was missing something. Critics, in their manner of having to have an opinion, claim that von Trier was addressing the nasty problems of race in the United States, but in his usually unusual style. Peter Bradshaw notes that von Trier is “intent on annoying us all” and that in the end “nobody, in the history of the world, has ever cared less about American slaves than our snickering maestro von Trier” (2006). Von Trier’s goal, instead, is to merely troll his American audiences. While I was not annoyed and did not feel particularly trolled by the mischievous von Trier, I could understand the critic’s gripe because what I did immediately notice about the film was that his portrayals were offering nothing new or interesting for people familiar with the history of the United States. Other critics, nevertheless, find that von Trier is wrestling with real concerns about racism in the United States.1 I suppose, in the end, that the critics agree: von Trier is treating the subject of American racism. Regardless of the agreement, I was quite suspicious of von Trier’s portrayal of black people, particularly because it is so stereotypical: black people are subjugated and submissive to the white folks, who are in positions of power and dominance. Even the twist that the black people developed and consented to the Mam’s Law, which may provide some inkling of agency, does so by sacrificing personality and recapitulating crude stereotypes. To add to this, von Trier is proffering the suggestion that slavery may just be preferable to freedom. On this account, I am sympathetic to critic Gary Younge, who notes that “Von Trier’s conclusions are not just simplistic; they are also insulting. The idea that African-Americans would consciously choose slavery rather than freedom doesn’t even work as a metaphor … To assert otherwise is to deny the historical agency of black Americans” (2006). Although Younge’s critique is on point, another possible reading of the film focuses on the critical lens that von Trier brings to the actual obstacles and struggles of black people during Reconstruction and the long historical aftermath extending to the present day. Yet, as critic Stephen Holden points out, “If there is nothing in the film that hasn’t been said before about America’s persistent racial strife and the reasons for it, its tone is that of a practical joker strewing whoopee cushions at a gathering, then sitting back to cackle at the rude noises made by the credulous fools taking their seats” (2006). For Holden, von Trier’s facetious manner of pointing out

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what is already known diminishes the seriousness of the important and crucial subject matter he is treating. This point, along with Younge’s concerns, makes me call into question the value of the movie’s contribution to the discussion of American racism. If its value is discernably very little, maybe von Trier was on to something slightly different. Along this line of thought, Elisabeth Anker offers an interesting appraisal of the film that highlights some important insights that von Trier may be on to regarding the emancipation of black people in the United States. Her analysis paints Manderlay as representing three distinct emancipations. The first emancipation regards black peoples’ lived experiences of white supremacy in the aftermath of the abstract, de jure freedom granted by the United States government in the wake of the Civil War. For Anker, this reading of the film is questioning “the lived possibilities of emancipation, about the real sense of vacuousness and disorder that emancipation confers upon those who are declared free while still enmeshed in a society structured by racial domination” (2016, 220). While this insight about the difficulties and struggles is not new, her impression is that von Trier is clearly articulating freedom and whiteness as inherently intertwined in the United States. She notes, “emancipation does not offer freedom because the very juridical and cultural grounds of society still align freedom with whiteness” (2016, 221–222). Building upon the first reading of the film, the second emancipation Anker advances is cast as a gift. Freedom is a gift Grace gives to the black people of Manderlay. This gift of emancipation is ultimately rejected despite her efforts to educate and discipline the black folks for lives as citizens in a liberal democracy. This interpretation of the film begins and ends in the same position, that of a white master whipping or about to whip Timothy. It is this circle of violence that Anker believes highlights “the histories of emancipation that position white people as the central agents of black freedom … Manderlay shows how black agency is denied within national imaginaries of emancipation” (2016, 224). In the end, it is white agents in the context of a white supremacist universe who are always the central figures, even in the emancipation narratives of black folks. What’s more, to thwart the agency or desires of the white protagonists is to invite the continual delimitation and denial of the agency of black people through violence. The final emancipation that Anker offers is a simulation of white freedom. That is to say, when Timothy steals the money from the group, he is performing the theft that is the material foundation of white supremacy;

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the theft of bodies, labor, opportunities, etc. What this reading of the film relies on, awkwardly, is the superficial stereotypes that I and other critics encounter in the film. For Anker, to read these as simple stereotypical scripts is to miss the possible ways they challenge white supremacy. Anker notes, “Yet it is precisely the counterintuitive, morally compromised, and small-scale qualities of these actions that grant their power. Together, they call attention to the unglamorous, obscure, and confusing possibilities for challenging racialized freedom that can still have liberatory effects, even if those effects are unclear and incomplete” (2016, 232). Anker’s multivalent examination of the film is quite interesting. It theorizes the deficiencies, hypocrisies, and immorality that are part and parcel of the standard emancipatory narratives of the United States. Her ultimate conclusion regarding von Trier’s film is that any emancipatory project or desire always has horizons of possibilities dictated by the culture in which those people are situated. “Emancipation [is],” Anker posits, “a process constantly remade by the different people who fight for it within and against the conditions they are conscripted to live” (2016, 233). This final point is well put but also indicates what Anker’s generous reading(s) of the film have taken for granted and how it needs further articulation. That is, Anker’s most interesting claim is that the film highlights and attempts to disarticulate emancipation/freedom from white supremacy. The problem is that the analysis focuses on emancipation/freedom while taking for granted the very precise conditions to which the lives of black folks are conscripted and circumscribed, that is, white supremacy. While this may seem obvious, there is an argument to be made that the film expresses a notion of American whiteness and white supremacy. That is, the entire drama and setting both, literal and fictional, cut an interesting description of the whiteness that dictates the fiction and by extension von Trier’s United States. This description of white supremacy is the ground for a universe that takes for granted emancipation being identified with whiteness. It is, furthermore, in this type of space where the objects of white thought and action (i.e. black bodies) performing white freedom contain this bizarre conceptual possibility of attempting separate freedom from whiteness in the first place. So what does von Trier’s depiction of American whiteness entail? What I contend is that he characterizes American whiteness as an ever-present power or influence that orders and organizes the structure that both recedes into the background but has an intractable quality of making its presence known. In this way, von Trier’s insight is not about race per se,

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but about how whiteness structures the horizon of experiences for those who encounter and are a part of this discreet universe. In what follows, I will be analyzing different aspects of the film including the stage set and lighting, the storyline, the plot, the main protagonist’s liberalism and fetishization of black experience and bodies, and the denouement. The examination is intended to illuminate von Trier’s notion of the United States as a universe that has whiteness as its foundational, ordering, and preserving concept. To begin to lay out von Trier’s description of American whiteness, it is best to start with the ground of the entire film. While this would seem to be the storyline, what is striking is von Trier’s use of Brechtian style—a white painted sound stage with tape markings to set off particular areas of the set is what composes the setting of Manderlay. The white sound stage discloses the foundation of the slave plantation Manderlay, and by extension the United States, as white universe, and it is from this whiteness that this specific drama unfolds. The stage set, as such, situates the dramatic scene as emerging out of a white morass; but yet, when viewing the film, it has a very dark, austere, and muted feel. While some of this is certainly a consequence of von Trier’s use of a spartan sound stage, the obscure environment is made more so by his use of lighting. The world of Manderlay arises out of the white foundation but has a dark atmosphere. However, the audience is reminded of the foundation and recognizes the order of rank through von Trier’s use of lighting throughout film. The overall lighting of the film has a chiaroscuro quality. With such characteristic, a consequence is that the majority of bodies and faces (the black ones) are lost in the darkness of the oscuro, while the several white’s faces, and especially the face of the main protagonist Grace, stand out as the chiaro. Even in the midst of the life that seems above and removed from the white foundation, whiteness breaks through to remind one of its place and purpose in the universe. That is, whiteness reflects the light that brings both the origin and order to the American universe. Von Trier’s development of the pervasive whiteness of the United States begins with arising out of the white stage and sparkles through the lighting while placing a basic storyline in the midst of this. However, it would be misleading to say that the storyline of Manderlay is endogenous to the film, even though the movie can be discretely and completely understood, enjoyed, hated, etc. without knowing it. The narrative, notwithstanding, is a continuation of Grace’s story that is the first component of von Trier’s USA: Land of Opportunities trilogy, Dogville. So while it is

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obvious that Grace intends to liberate and educate the slaves of Manderlay, this isn’t their drama. Rather, the film’s general narrative is about Grace’s grievance with her father and her struggle to prove her worth to him. Manderlay and its residents become incidental means to realize Grace’s intentions, goals, and desires. To put this clearly, this is Grace’s drama, and it is her storyline that provides the actualization of the values of white supremacy that structure the universe and her struggles.2 What is found throughout her efforts is that she is imposing the typical white liberal order of rank, while also displaying many of its pernicious and ugly qualities. On a final note about the overarching narrative, I think that it is important to point out that Grace’s chance to intervene in Manderlay is made possible by her permissive, yet patriarchal father. It is the white patriarch, after having rescued Grace from Dogville, that allows her to stay in Manderlay, and who will eventually return to take Grace with him once more. The content of the storyline—the plot—is an extension of Grace’s escape from Dogville. After being rescued by her father, they are driving and stumble upon a circumstance where they are asked by a black woman to intervene upon a situation in which a black man was about to be lashed on a whipping post. Grace realizes that they have stumbled upon an anachronistic plantation that is still practicing chattel slavery and immediately demands it cease being such a place. In order to begin to make this happen, Grace uses her father’s coterie of goons to help coerce the white people of Manderlay to cooperate with her goals of establishing and maintaining a new order. It just so happens that Mam was about to die, and along with that, she asked that Wilhelm destroy the book (Mam’s Law) that explicated the rules and regulations of Manderlay. While Grace assumes that the text is a retrograde order of rank, she does not allow the book to be destroyed. Instead, she keeps it but doesn’t read it. Mam dies and the outcome of the situation is Grace taking over Manderlay, and in that process, even with the help of the thugs that her father left behind to protect/help her, she is unable to provide the sustainable life that Mam once did. She can neither educate the slaves of Manderlay, nor make productive the old plantation.3 Her frustration grows with her inability to meet her goals so she eventually reads Mam’s Law. To better help Grace understand the book, Wilhelm explains that Manderlay was a negotiated contract that was intended to help both ends of the spectrum maintain a life that was relatively safe and predictable in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The film ends with her intervention leaving the

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­ eople worse off than when the story began and with Grace absconding p from Manderlay with her father. Manderlay’s plotline can easily be viewed as a critique of white liberalism: it’s arrogance, it’s imperiousness, it’s lack of self-awareness, it’s an implicit agreement with racial hierarchy and anti-black racism.4 Throughout Grace’s struggle to save the people of Manderlay, all these qualities come to the fore, but with the added notion that the values assumed to be consistent with liberation and education, are, in practice, just as wicked and destructive as the values that previously ruled. Grace took for granted that her values provided the corrective to the perverse situation that she had encountered. She presupposed that the slaves wanted anything to do with her in the first place, let alone the values that she was attempting to implement. Her certitude and arrogance provided the grounds to entirely ignore the document that could possibly help her understand the anachronism that Manderlay was, and to begin to meet the people, she intended to help, where they were at psychologically, socially, and historically. What’s more, by ignoring Mam’s Law, she ignored the possibility that the people of Manderlay had some agency. This does two things. First, it preserves the assumption that black bodies are to be both thought about and acted upon without those bodies input or consent. Second, it neuters the tiny bit of agency that might be a location to work to develop some of the values Grace intended to impart to the slaves of Manderlay.5 With regard to the racial hierarchy and anti-black racism of white liberalism, this is most apparent with Grace’s intrigue with Timothy. It is here that one can see the perverse infatuation whiteness has with black bodies.6 While this is not an interesting or subtle observation about sexual desire being tinged with the fetishization of black bodies, this stands as the slap in the face about her seemingly correct views. That is, Grace misconstrued Timothy’s true identity (a plebian) for being African royalty. In this case, her infatuation with a noble African was a myth that was imposed upon Timothy. From Grace’s perspective, his attitude and actions only confirmed her view that Timothy was royalty. Timothy took advantage of her credulousness which provoked Grace to impose the identity of criminal upon him. Hence, in the end, we only know Timothy as the identities Grace foisted upon him. It is with these identities that white liberalism fixes black bodies. While the glamorized vision of the regal African seems to be a positive understanding of a black body, to violate the white expectations about such identity is to invite both being pigeonholed to the

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alternative stereotype (criminality) and experiencing the violence that often accompanies it. So what does von Trier’s critique of white liberalism further illuminate about the universe of American whiteness? And how does this relate to the fetishization of black bodies? One way of thinking about it is that von Trier is highlighting how the alternative ideology to combat and overcome racism is really just another ideology that sits directly within the confines of the white universe of which it is a part. It is a white woman with the apparently correct ideology that is imposing an order of rank upon black people. The apparent narrative of the difficulties of liberation of black people is couched in the reality of white people defining and determining the possibilities of black people. While this is a white universe, the entire spectrum of protagonists—white people—assume the utmost importance of black bodies with all the time they spend thinking and acting upon them. Grace’s fetishization of Timothy, accordingly, is merely the logical extension of the white liberal ideology, but instead of moving to vilify black bodies which makes them phobic objects, this makes the bodies objects of fetishistic desire. This then is just the inverse of what Grace was attempting to reconcile. However, both of these are false, imposed narratives that circumscribe the expectations, interpretations, and experiences of all those locked into the universe of American whiteness. Despite the falseness of these identities, the entire ideological universe of American whiteness agrees to the subjugation of black bodies, but yet quibbles about the manner in which to manage such bodies. The denouement provides for the full force of the ideological consistency throughout the white universe of Manderlay. Grace is angry with Timothy and with the slaves of Manderlay generally. She has not been able to create an environment or people that can cut the liberal, democratic mustard. Her frustration with the process and people eventually comes to a head with her decision to punish and whip Timothy. On top of this, Grace has decided to abandon Manderlay by hitching a ride with her father out of the area. As her father pulls up to the old plantation, he notices her violently lashing Timothy on the whipping post and notes that Grace has everything under control. The denouement, as such, allows for the ideological consistency of the white universe to come full circle. Black bodies only respond to violence, and violence against those bodies is what indicates that they are under control. Grace’s final, violent action in Manderlay indicates her consent to this abhorrent belief and to the underlying agreement about black bodies in the white universe of the United States.

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What I have attempted to show is von Trier’s view of the United States as a white universe, which founds and orders itself around ideologies of white supremacy. Regardless of the political valence taken in the United States, the tinge of white supremacy cannot be avoided, even though it seems to be the case that this whiteness has receded into the background to appear as unnoticeable. Yet, throughout the film this whiteness cannot help make itself known as it is an irrepressible quality of the white universe of the United States. This description of whiteness, furthermore, helps to supplement Anker’s work on the possibility of emancipation. Taken together, von Trier’s description of whiteness only leads to the conclusion that if there is any emancipation it is only for, by, and granted from white supremacist order of rank. In light of this supplement to Anker’s arguments, I find her optimism in the third emancipation a little misplaced. While the simulation of white freedom disrupts its ideological consistency, it does not address the primary problem. The problem is not freedom, but that in the universe of white supremacy, freedom is only for and about white people. In such a universe, no minor disruptions are going to change that fundamental precept. Rather, what is needed is the destruction of such a universe and the creation of one that is for and about everyone. Unfortunately, it is this universe of American whiteness that remains at the end of Manderlay, and it is American whiteness that presumably structures the final installment of the USA: Land of Opportunities trilogy. More grimly, however, it is this universe of American whiteness that continues to structure the actual present and proximate future of those living under this cultural horizon.

Notes 1. For more favorable reviews along with lines of critically examining race relations in the United States, see Wilmington (2006) and Ebert (2006). 2. Anker (2016) makes a similar point in the context of the second emancipation. 3. Bainbridge (2007) provides a nice reading of Manderlay which offers similar insights. 4. Anker’s second and third emancipations can be read as critiques of liberalism, see also Lloyd (2008). 5. For interesting discussion of agency in Manderlay, see Doughty (2007). 6. For an analysis of Manderlay that focuses the black body, particularly from a Lacanian lens, see Elbeshlawy (2014).

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References Anker, Elisabeth. 2016. Three Emancipations: Manderlay and Racialized Freedom. In Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier, ed. Bonnie Honig and Lori J. Marso, 216–239. New York: Oxford University Press. Bainbridge, Caroline. 2007. The Cinema of Lars von Trier: Authenticity and Artifice. London: Wallflower Press. Bradshaw, Peter. 2006. Review of Manderlay (film), directed by Lars von Trier. The Guardian, March 3. https://www.theguardian.com/ culture/2006/mar/03/2. Doughty, Ruth. 2007. Manderlay (2005): Lars von Trier’s Narrative of Passing. New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 5 (2): 153–161. https://doi. org/10.1386/ncin.5.2.153/1. Ebert, Roger. 2006. Review of Manderlay (film), directed by Lars von Trier. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/manderlay-2006. Elbeshlawy, Ahmed. 2014. Lars von Trier’s Manderlay: The Black Body as a Cinematic Gift. Sexuality and Culture 18: 719–734. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s12119-014-9235-4. Holden, Stephen. 2006. An America Where Gangsters Free Slaves Not Keen for Liberation. The New  York Times, January 27. https://www.nytimes. com/2006/01/27/movies/an-america-where-gangsters-free-slaves-not keen-for-liberation.html. Lloyd, Vincent. 2008. Law, Grace, and Race: The Political Theology of Manderlay. Theory & Event 11 (3). https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.0.0012. Wilmington, Michael. 2006. Von Trier’s Trilogy Tackles U.S.  Racism in Stylish ‘Manderlay’. Chicago Tribune, February 17. https://www.chicagotribune. com/news/ct-xpm-2006-02-17-0602170261-story.html. Younge, Gary. 2006. Liberty? No Thanks. The Guardian, February 23. https:// www.theguardian.com/film/2006/feb/24/1.

CHAPTER 5

Art and Myth: Beyond Binaries Susanne Claxton

Abstract  Employing the Agambean analysis of sovereign power as always involving a state of exception, as well as Heidegger’s ideas on art and truth as aletheia, an analysis of von Trier’s Antichrist is undertaken so as to demonstrate that the film ought best be understood as a work of art that acknowledges yet challenges the standard and ruling binaries of man and woman, masculine and feminine, culture and nature, and the paradigm of which they are a part, so as to make possible the unconcealment of an alternative “truth” that is hidden and obscured by the ruling paradigm and its binaries. Thus, new possibilities for both meaning and human being are discovered. Keywords  Agamben • Aletheia • Binaries • Heidegger • Lilith • Myth

Introduction All true art is in its essence polysemic. In no way is this a claim to some sort of relativism or mere subjectivism. Rather, as Heidegger attempts to make clear, all true art, as that greater mode of revealing that is poiesis itself, is disclosive of being as aletheia. Aletheia is “truth” understood as an

S. Claxton (*) Humanities Faculty, Southern New Hampshire University, Hooksett, NH, USA © The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Haro, W. H. Koch (eds.), The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24918-2_5

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unconcealment at whose heart concealment always remains. True art as aletheia deals not with mere “facts” nor with things that are reducible so as to be said to be “true” as opposed to “false.” Rather, true art as aletheia is a means of creatively and poietically disclosing and exploring the realm of the possible that lies beyond the realm of the merely actual. Thus, all true art is a means by which we may arrive at new and different insights, meanings, and understandings.1 For Heidegger, art, as disclosive of truth as aletheia, is a continuous process of concealment and unconcealment. The polysemic nature of art becomes evident to those who comport themselves toward it with the appropriate kind of openness and active receptivity. The idea that art possesses the capacity to reveal to us something previously unseen is in no way a new or novel idea. Paul Klee seems to say as much with his well-known assertion that “art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.” In our experiences of art (and our experiences in general), particular background assumptions, metaphysical ideas, and archetypal themes are always present that are themselves constitutive parts of the very epoch or paradigm in which we exist. They operate as structural components of our “constellation of intelligibility.”2 While any given constellation of intelligibility is the means by which we make sense of our experiences, any given constellation of intelligibility is itself grounded in a particular metaphysical understanding of the being of entities. Thus, while it provides a framework that makes understanding possible, it necessarily imposes limits upon our understanding and conceals from view that which lies beyond those limits. Myth itself may be understood as a form of art. The historical and enduring pertinence of myth, in terms of its archetypes, tropes, motifs, and themes, in our experience of life and art, is due to the multilayered and polysemic nature of myth as poiesis and aletheia. For Heidegger, poiesis is that greater mode of revealing that “lets what presences come forth into appearance” (Heidegger 1977, 27). In this way, myth allows for its ongoing adaptability throughout time and to myriad circumstance. Thus is myth able to retain its relevance from individual to individual, culture to culture, and throughout different eras and epochs. Both myth and art are rich sources of potentially inexhaustible meaning. These traits of myth and art are revelatory of “truth” understood as aletheia; that is, truth understood not as something finite but rather as something much richer than any modern and late-modern reductionist rendering of “truth” that posits “truth” as only that which is opposed to “falsity.”3

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In this essay, I will employ the aforementioned concepts in an exploration of von Trier’s film Antichrist so as to see what may be unconcealed in this work of art. In this unconcealing process of discovering possible new meanings, I will point out insights to be gained regarding any merely actual but nonetheless fruitless long-standing assumptions. I will endeavor to show that the film does not simply reinscribe the tired binaries of male/female and masculine/feminine but rather subtly attempts to unconceal a truth beyond those binaries, a truth the operation of the binaries themselves obscure, a truth discoverable when we approach the film via “meditative thinking” (Heidegger 1966, 53). To be clear, in no way do I claim to be hitting upon “the truth” of von Trier’s Antichrist; instead, I will seek to unconceal “a truth.” In other words, my aim will be to reveal one or more relevant and revelatory “truths” present in the film experienced as art and to demonstrate how and in what ways they may assist us in arriving at new and different understandings of some things perhaps long-understood as “settled.” The vital import of this approach to art is one carefully articulated by Iain Thomson in his book Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity where he writes, “For, if being is conceptually inexhaustible, capable of yielding meaning again and again, then the intrinsic meanings of things must be plural (or essentially polysemic) however paradoxical such a doctrine of ontological pluralism might now seem, given our current obsession with formal systems capable of securing monosemic exactitude” (Thomson 2011, 24). If the very idea of embracing ontological pluralism and thus foregoing quests for monosemic exactitude ought make sense to us anywhere, it is most certainly in the realm that is the discussion of art. Heidegger asserts: The essence of art is not the expression of any ‘lived experience’ and does not consist in an artist expressing his ‘soul-life’ … Neither does it consist in the artist depicting reality more accurately and more precisely, or producing something that gives pleasure to others, enjoyment of a higher or lower type. Rather, the artist possesses essential insight for the possible, for bringing out the inner possibilities of beings, thus for making man see what it really is with which he so blindly busies himself. (Heidegger 2002, 46)

For Heidegger, true art makes possible unconcealment. By embracing Heidegger’s view in our approach, we are rendered able to gain insight into the possibilities of beings while at the same time come to see more clearly that which may be limiting us if we only blindly busy ourselves with it.

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My perspective herein is one that privileges this Heideggerian understanding of art and myth as a means by which we can more fully understand and appreciate our human experiences, mysterious and otherwise, our modern and late-modern human existence, and the realms of both the actual and the possible. In this way, we are able to mine the riches of art (and myth) and embrace it as “that which creatively results from the point of view that is the poietic phenomenological approach to human existence,” recognizing it as “a way of conceptualizing experiences … that are felt by mortals to be encounters between the mortal and an outside force experienced and perceived as acting upon them” (Claxton 2017, 59). I will also seek a way to bring more clearly into focus the limitations of certain more common perspectives and faulty assumptions through the use and application of important ideas from Giorgio Agamben.

Binaries In my own work and research, I have found Agamben’s analysis of sovereign power and the central importance of his state of exception in thus founding sovereign power highly instructive for thinking about dichotomies, dualisms, and binaries.4 While there may be a few binaries in existence whose two parts share equal status, the majority of binaries operative in our paradigm do indeed privilege one of the two of the pair as distinctly more powerful or more highly prized. Thus does one of the pair exercise a kind of dominance over the other. Here I will offer a brief explanation of Agamben’s ideas but refer the reader to Chap. 5 of my book for a much more in-depth explanation and account.5 In his work, Agamben demonstrates that what we may here refer to as a “binary,” a binary in which one of the two set forth in the pair that make up the binary is operative as superior or sovereign, is first and only established by the purposeful and willful exclusion of some third alternative/ being/domain/realm/element by the one of the pair that will become the binary seeking to establish itself as superior or sovereign. The purposeful exclusion of that third element by the one of the pair seeking dominance over the other creates what Agamben calls a state of exception. In Agamben’s analysis, it is precisely in the action of excluding or abandoning that third element that dominance is asserted, sovereignty is founded, and the binary itself then firmly established. As Agamben explains, that which aspires to sovereign rule establishes its sovereign rule by first implementing a state of exception that is the willful

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abandonment of some third element. Only then can the aspiring sovereign firmly establish the desired binary. In other words, only by means of the creation of the state of exception can the aspiring sovereign then draw the further distinction needed and thus set itself apart from and act as sovereign over the other part of the binary. Only by means of this particular process is the binary founded and sovereign rule secured. Agamben writes: The exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule. (Agamben 1998, 18)

While this is a brief accounting of Agamben’s excellent analysis, something I have written elsewhere may assist in elucidating the phenomenon: In order to offer an illustration of Agamben’s ideas on how the rule makes of itself the rule by establishing the exception, I offer the following analogy: Imagine there are a group of children playing together. Now, imagine that one child determines for whatever reason that he no longer wishes to speak or interact with one of the other children. He henceforth engages in what we would call the silent treatment in regards to the rejected child. In so far as he maintains that position and refuses to speak or be engaged by the rejected child that he has chosen to shun, under Agamben’s theory, he simultaneously creates both himself as the rule and the other child as the exception. The other child is indeed included in the shunning child’s realm of power by means of being excluded …. The shunned child, as Agamben would say, did not subtract himself from the rule but was abandoned or made an exception by the actions of the shunning child who asserts himself as the rule by means of suspending himself in relation to the other child. Agamben makes clear that the dynamic does not simply end in the rule and its exception. In establishing itself by means of delineating that which is excluded, the rule founds its power so as to make a further distinction [thus designating other children, by choosing to include and speak to them, as both his sovereign subjects and the needed corollary in the created binary]. (Claxton 2017, 108)

The import of these ideas for the purpose of this essay is to bring to light the hermeneutic instructiveness of this Agambean model of analysis as a different and insightful way of analyzing binaries so as to unconceal something about them generally left concealed. Thus are we able to approach established binaries as potentially always having at their foundation some excluded or abandoned third element upon which the binary itself is

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founded and one of the two parts of the binary rendered as sovereign. This, in turn, enables us to move beyond the binary and unconceal deeper truths hidden thereby. Employing such an approach in attempting to understand von Trier’s Antichrist assists in revealing the subtle ways in which the film, in my view, opens up the possibility for moving beyond established binaries.

The Obvious and the Not So Obvious As critics, reviewers, and others have noted, von Trier’s Antichrist is provocative. While popular opinions have varied as to the film’s value as art, few popular film reviews did little more than scratch the surface of this film.6 Reading various reviews in an attempt to get a sense of how the film was received, and only after having watched the film multiple times, it became apparent that many details in the film were often either completely missed, ignored, or inaccurately reported by reviewers. For example, none of the popular reviews I read accurately described that Dafoe’s character found his hand covered with blood-fattened ticks after having fallen asleep with his hand outside the cabin window. “White bugs” (Brannan 2016) and “lichen” (Brooks 2009) were some of the inaccurate descriptions offered for what covered Dafoe’s character’s hand. While this failure to provide an accurate description may no doubt be attributed to the sheer wealth of detail contained in the film, it points to the limitations of the viewers and the way in which a single viewing of this film may simply not be adequate for attaining a genuine experience of it as art. Just as a single reading of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment will leave one with at least some understanding of the relevant ideas, the layered truths and meanings of Crime and Punishment are better unconcealed through multiple readings. And even then, if the work is read again and again, over time, even more is unconcealed. Yet, as is true of all great art, the reader never arrives at complete and total unconcealment; the reader is never finally in possession of “the whole truth” of the work. This phenomenon of continued unconcealment is itself due to the very nature of true art as poiesis  and aletheia. The possible “truths” and meanings of any given work are never a finite totality to be completely and fully comprehended or apprehended. The “truths” of any given work may only be experienced and received in bits and pieces via the unconcealing nature of aletheia through varying perspectives and differing points of view, both of which often change over time.

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Nonetheless, von Trier’s Antichrist does indeed deal with a variety of themes most can agree upon, even from a single viewing of the film: death, sexuality, violence, misogyny, patriarchy, good, evil, human nature, nature, reason, man, woman, and even Satan. What the film as art unconceals about these things, however, has received little adequate treatment. From the outrage of some feminists to the disgust of some moralists to the contempt of some film critics, the condemnations of von Trier’s Antichrist have included mention of some or all of the aforementioned things. But is the film really so simple, so egregious, so inappropriate, and so vile? I think not. Perhaps here we do well to consider that oft-quoted assertion that “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” Our contemporary culture is one in which it does seem that many people are becoming more aware of things that our pre-technology-saturated world kept fairly well hidden, but it is also one in which the sheer volume of information, media, images, and ideas available can easily overwhelm. Perhaps this overwhelm encourages and promotes oversimplification and reductionism. Quantity is mistaken for quality. Slogans and buzzwords abound. Outrage dominates too much discourse. Careful, thoughtful, and critical consideration of images, words, things, ideas, and works of art has become too scarce. Too often lost are distinctions, subtleties, nuance, and an aim to think more deeply. Thus do Heidegger’s words ring truer now perhaps more than ever, “[W]hat is most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking times is that we are still not thinking” (Heidegger 2004, 6). I wish to think about von Trier’s Antichrist.

The Familiar Binaries In the film, von Trier’s main characters are known simply as “He” and “She.” This points us toward long-standing binaries of man/woman, male/female, masculine/feminine, and so on. To simply assume, however, that von Trier is adopting and affirming such tired dichotomies and the metaphysics that they presuppose is a failure in thinking. The film’s characters do indeed exemplify many of the traits commonly associated with each of the two parts of the established binary. He is the sovereign ruler. He is rational, emotionally detached, controlling, and self-assured. She is his subject. She is emotional, seemingly irrational, at times subservient, at times hysterical, and often, it seems, self-doubting. He is paternal and protective; He assumes responsibility for directing the future and claims to be doing what he believes is best for her. She is fragile, dependent, and

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lacking in any solid sense of self-worth. She does at times defy him, calling into question whether or not He really does in fact know best. She is also manipulative in a way commonly construed as “feminine,” as evidenced in the scene in which she accuses him of abandoning her and their son during the summer despite his claim that she had in fact told him she wanted to go alone with their son to Eden in order to work on her thesis. When He explains to her that he gave her the space and solitude because she in fact asked him for it, She replies with “Perhaps I didn’t mean it.” This characteristic—of her to expect him to somehow know what she really means even when her own words clearly state something to the contrary—is one often standardly ascribed to women in the accepted binary construction. Hence the common assertions to the effect of “Women are impossible to understand,” “Women are fickle,” “Women do not know what they want,” and “It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind.” While He appears as perhaps too detached from his own child’s death, She demonstrates a very unhealthy attachment to and expectation of such a small child when late in the film she says of her dead son, “Nic might have made more of an effort to be there for me.” Antichrist is indeed full of lines, motifs, images, and themes that exemplify the standard binary construct of woman and man. However, a careful and thoughtful consideration of the film may reveal that these assumptions are in fact being challenged in the film, and that beyond the standard binary lies something concealed thereby.

She Is Lilith For those familiar with the mythological figure of Lilith, her presence and action in the film’s female character is not to be missed. For Lilith is both a seductress and a child-killer.7 So powerful is Lilith’s seductive charm that she is able to undo any man, or so her mythology tells us. For those not in the know, Lilith was Adam’s first wife, his wife before Eve. The book of Genesis offers two accounts of creation, one following the other. In the first account, God makes both man and woman from the dirt of the earth, and then he makes the animals. In the second account, the animals already exist, and God creates woman from man’s rib. The mythology and lore that arose in order to make sense of the two differing accounts held that the first wife was Lilith. Being made from the earth like Adam, Lilith refused to submit to him. Her refusal to lay beneath Adam for the sex act resulted in her leaving the Garden of Eden to reside near the Red Sea

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where she acted out her lust and defiance. God then created Eve from Adam’s rib so that she would be more properly submissive to him. Lilith, however, did return to the Garden of Eden in the form of a serpent and tempted Eve. We know how the story goes thereafter. The numerous textual accounts of Lilith posit her as the sole source and cause of any and all erotic longing.8 So great is her seductive power that she causes the nocturnal emissions of men who sleep alone. She leads men astray into lasciviousness. Lilith is even dangerously present when married couples copulate. Thus is it said of her, “And behold, that hard shell, Lilith, is always present in the bedlinen of man and wife when they copulate, in order to take hold of the sparks of the drops of semen which are lost” (Bachrach 2013, 19c). Also, “Lilith, God preserve us, has dominion over children who issue from him who couples with his wife in candlelight, or with his wife naked, or at a time when he is forbidden to have intercourse with her” (84b). Lilith is asserted to be the source and cause of all incarnate and embodied sexual desire and lust. While the historical development of the mythological figure of Lilith was one undertaken primarily in the context of Judaism and Jewish thought, the figure of Lilith and what she represents was appropriated into Christianity, albeit through the attribution of Lilith’s characteristics to Eve. In other words, in the context of more explicitly Christian writings, Lilith’s distinct characteristics are assimilated into Eve while Lilith herself is further and more explicitly abandoned. Man, as represented by Adam, is the sovereign, and woman, represented by Eve, his subject. Lilith is the state of exception that founded man as sovereign and thus allowed the binary of Adam and Eve, Man and Woman, to be established. And of course this is all sanctioned by the ultimate divine masculine sovereign, God himself. Lilith is not only the source of all lust and sexual sin. She is also a child-­ killer. She is deemed responsible for miscarriages, stillbirths, barrenness, and the death of infants; all manner of afflictions having to do with failed reproductive capacity are attributed to her. Women are held to be particularly susceptible to her influence and harm prior to the loss of virginity, during menstruation, and the hours before childbirth (Patai 1964, 298). Thus, all things uniquely feminine or belonging to woman in the embodied sense are themselves labeled as “evil” or potentially “evil,” given their connection to Lilith. Lilith, as the wanton and dangerous female, inciter of lust, and killer of children, is present in Antichrist in the character of She. While there are

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numerous scenes that depict Gainsbourg’s character as aggressive, irresponsible, manipulative, and dangerous in her hyper-sexuality, the revealing of her as a child-killer is less straightforward. There are clues from the start that she is remiss in her duties as Nic’s mother. We learn in Chap. 3 of the film that She had consistently put her son’s shoes on the wrong feet despite his cries, resulting in his bones’ abnormal development. Only toward the end of the film do we see her as a child-killer. In Chap. 4, The Three Beggars, in the moments leading up to her self-­ mutilation, She places her husband’s hand between her legs; there is a black and white flashback to the opening scene of the film, the moments leading up to their child’s death. In the flashback, it appears that She did in fact see their son climb up onto the desk toward the open window; her face reflects slight surprise and malevolent anticipation. The scene then reverts to present time, and She begins to cry and touch herself; another black and white flashback shows the child fall from the window; her face assumes a look of satisfaction, for She presumably has just climaxed. The scene reverts again to present time, and She asks her husband to hold her while she proceeds to cut off her clitoris, perhaps in an attempt to rid herself of Lilith. She soon declares, however, “But none of it is of any use.” And most assuredly none of it is of any use, but why? While the Prologue reveals that She is a passionate woman despite her domestic trappings, the remainder of the film depicts her as someone plagued by insecurities, doubts, and uncertainties; someone desperately needy yet seething with rancor and resentment; someone whose true character is hard to discern, vacillating as She does between seemingly helpless confusion, fear, and pain and self-righteous, mocking, scornful contempt. She is trapped in a universe of extremes, a universe made up of good and evil, truth and lies, love and hate. At times She appears to be someone whose entire sense of self is predicated solely upon how she believes He perceives and judges her. This is never more unconcealed than in Chap. 1, Grief, when, having just returned home together after her hospital stay, they are discussing her time alone with Nic at the cabin and her thesis. She says to him, “As you said when I talked to you about my subject, ‘Glib’.” He denies having said those words. She replies, “Perhaps you didn’t use that word, but that’s what you meant, and all of a sudden it was glib. Or even worse, some kind of lie.” This is indicative of her perception of him as an arbiter of truth and the masculine as sovereign. Her work only has value if He deems it so. Wrought by confusion and endless vacillation

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between extremes, extremes built into the paradigm she inhabits via its well-established binaries and the realm of being that was abandoned in the creation of the binaries and paradigm, She can find no stable ground on which to establish a solid footing. He, too, however, feels the weight of confusion, both hers and his own, and this becomes more apparent as the film unfolds. His insistence, for example, that her fear must have an object makes no allowance for the possibility of an existential angst with no definite object, an angst born of being “not at home” in the world, as Heidegger would say. This is an unquestioned metaphysical presupposition upon which the paradigm they occupy is based. His insistence, also, that her “thoughts distort reality” and not the other way around, reflects the way in which he is given to a modern materialist metaphysics that posits “reality” as both wholly knowable and completely independent of the human perceiving it. And although He does assert “What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve,” he clearly fails to grasp its fuller implications in terms of the possible effects that her thesis research had upon her in the paradigm they occupy. He also demeans and belittles her articulations regarding the falling acorns and the notion of life as saturated by death when he says that her articulations are appropriate to a “children’s book.” This, too, speaks to the ways in which He conceives of rationality and maturity as dictated solely by an objective and scientific patriarchy. Likewise, his insistence that “Good and evil have nothing to do with therapy” and “Obsessions never materialize; it’s a scientific fact” are little more than cherished slogans belonging to the paradigm he inhabits. Yet, we see as the film unfolds that his own confusion grows and his dreams and visions indeed disturb. Ultimately, the film reveals that both He and She are prisoners of society’s established paradigm and its unquestioned norms and binaries. Both characters, in their own ways, sense the reality of something that they cannot see clearly and thus cannot name; it is concealed from them through their own unreflective and unquestioning acceptance of the paradigm in which they exist and the constellation of intelligibility that rules therein. That which they both sense, that which is begging for unconcealment via thoughtful confrontation with their paradigm is, I contend, the very thing that was abandoned in the establishment of the paradigm and its norms and binaries. In unconcealing and reclaiming that which was abandoned, a new constellation of intelligibility is made possible.

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Beyond Binaries If we approach von Trier’s Antichrist with an aim toward thinking about standard binaries long established, we find many at play: man versus woman, culture versus nature, good versus evil, rational versus irrational, reason versus emotion, truth versus falsity, life versus death, blossom versus decay, science versus superstition, pleasure versus pain, and so many more. Using Agamben’s analysis, we can unconceal something very important about that which was abandoned in the establishment of such binaries. Thus may we begin to see more clearly how reclaiming it may set us free. As I have argued elsewhere, Lilith and what she represents is not, in truth, accurately assumed as representative only of women and the feminine, despite its patriarchal history of having been so. Rather, Lilith and what she represents is most properly understood as something fundamentally human.9 Lilith represents the fundamental non-rational nature of human sexuality. Neither rational nor irrational, human sexuality, as a lived and embodied phenomenological experience, precedes all reflection thereupon; it overflows and exceeds the limits imposed by the binary. The experience of non-rational human sexuality is one that leaves all human beings, male, female, or otherwise, feeling as though they are being acted upon by forces outside themselves and beyond their control. In seeking to establish himself as sovereign, man willfully denied and abandoned that part of himself that is represented by Lilith and rendered it a state of exception, although in actuality it is an innate and inescapable part of himself as a human being. In his aspiration to dominance, man denied and abandoned an aspect of his own humanity and projected it solely onto woman and the feminine. Man thus established himself as sovereign by means of abandoning this aspect of himself, and from there, he made the further distinction that firmly established the binary of man and woman and thus determined all related binaries as mapping directly onto that foundational binary. For, whether we are looking at the binaries of the rational versus irrational, reason versus emotion, good versus evil, truth versus falsity, and so on, the “superior” one of any given pair is, in our current paradigm, almost always aligned with man and the masculine. Gainsbourg’s character, She, is indeed a prisoner of that paradigm and its binaries, and She judges herself accordingly, “False in legs, and false in thighs; False in breast, teeth, hair, and eyes.” Her claim that “Nature is Satan’s church” also reflects this fundamental aspect of the established

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paradigm, for the binary of culture and nature is, like the others, one that sets forth culture as masculine, nature as feminine, and the former as sovereign ruler over the latter.10 Thus do I see in von Trier’s Antichrist a subtle questioning and rejection of these long-established binaries. In doing so, a recognition and reclamation of that which was thereby abandoned is made possible. Nature is neither good nor evil. It is beyond good and evil, or, at the least, it is both and more. Likewise, upon thoughtful reflection, we can see that neither man nor woman may lay sole claim to any one particular part of any particular binary. Human beings, as such, may participate in and partake of any part of any binary, and both assuredly do participate in that which lies beyond the binary, that which was abandoned so as to establish the binary in the first place. The many tragedies of human existence, perhaps, may in fact be best understood as the result of the unreflective acceptance of established binaries and the tension that results from denying the nagging pull of that abandoned but never annihilated third element that made possible the establishment of the binary in the first place, that is, the non-­ rational nature of human sexuality and our pre-reflective phenomenological experiences of it as embodied beings. Given the nature of the paradigm in which we exist, it is not surprising that She is the character most maligned, most tortured, and most astonishing. However, as already mentioned, the film reveals that He, too, finds himself questioning the “reality” imposed by the standard binaries that constitute his paradigm. His encounters with the deer whose foal dangles lifelessly from her womb, the self-consuming fox who declares that “Chaos reigns,” and the raven who at first seems to wish him to be found in his hiding place (the foxhole beneath the tree) but later seems to wish to help him escape (by leading him to the wrench beneath the floorboards) are all indicative of the ways in which He, too, experiences the pull of that which he cannot name, that which his paradigm conceals. And while “dreams are of no interest to modern psychology,” He is nonetheless plagued and haunted by them. And although He wishes to see himself as inhabiting a rational and objective world, more than once does he submit to his own non-rational sexual nature and impulses and with an ever-increasing vigor. From simple sex to sadomasochistic sex, He, like She, is clearly effected by forces seemingly  beyond his control, forces experienced as acting upon him. Thus, toward the end of the film, when He gazes at the stars out the cabin window and says, “There’s no such constellation,” perhaps it is best understood as an utterance indicative of his realization that the reality to

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which he has subscribed, much like the constellation of The Three Beggars present in her research, is not in fact “real” at all, but merely a simple human construct, a construct that, like any constellation of intelligibility, allows us to make sense of our world while necessarily skewing our perception, imposing blinders, and rendering us its prisoners. In conclusion, Antichrist, as a work of art, provides us with much to reflect upon and consider, not the least of which are both our own openness to it as art and that which may be unconcealed to us thereby. And while our paradigm is one in which all too often there is a “quest for monosemic exactitude,” we can, if we wish, embrace ontological pluralism and polysemy so as to escape the confines of the merely actual and get a glimpse of the possible, the possible world that lies beyond the binaries.

Notes 1. One quick way to conceive of how what I am calling “true art” is to be distinguished from “art” that is not “true art” is via the phenomenon of kitsch. Sometimes called a “deficient form of art,” kitsch, as such and by its very nature, does not provide new insights or new meanings. Rather, kitsch, whether negative or positive, merely reinforces beliefs, values, and ideals already dominant in a given society. Nothing new is added. No insight is gained. No new questions are conceived. True art, however, opens up new ways of thinking, provides insight, explores alternative conceptualizations of phenomena, and unconceals alternative ways of being in the world. 2. Heidegger scholar Iain Thomson first coined this phrase in his 1999 dissertation. While the phrase has been adopted by many other scholars, it first appeared publicly in Thomson’s first published book, Heidegger on Ontotheology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 3. See Heidegger’s “On the Essence of Truth” for his own detailed account. 4. See Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 5. Susanne Claxton, Heidegger’s Gods: An Ecofeminist Perspective (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017). 6. There have been some much more substantive articles written about Antichrist in the area of psychoanalysis. 7. For a detailed examination of Lilith via historical sources, see both Chap. 5 of my book and the essay by Raphael Patai, “Lilith” in the Journal of American Folklore 77: 306 (1964): 295–314. 8. I explore this at length in Chap. 5 of my book, Heidegger’s Gods: An Ecofeminist Perspective.

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9. I make the case for this interpretation in Chap. 5 of Heidegger’s Gods: An Ecofeminist Perspective. 10. Agamben, in his book Homo Sacer, employs the ancient concepts of zoeand bios in his analysis of sovereign power and the crucial role the state of exception plays. Other excellent works to consult on this matter are Sherry Ortner’s essay “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture” and Patricia Glazebrook’s essay “Gynocentric Eco-logics.”

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bachrach, Naftali Hertz. 2013. Sefer Emek haMelech. New York: Hebrew Books. Brannan, Alex. 2016. The Philosophy of Antichrist: Expulsion from Eden. https://cinefilesreviews.com/2016/04/23/the-philosophy-of-antichristexpulsion-from-eden/4/. Brooks, Xan. 2009. Antichrist: A Work of Genius or the Sickest Film in the History of Cinema? https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/jul/16/antichristlars-von-trier-feminism. Claxton, Susanne. 2017. Heidegger’s Gods: An Ecofeminist Perspective. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Heidegger, Martin. 1966. Discourse on Thinking. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 2002. The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus. Trans. Ted Sadler. London: Continuum. ———. 2004. What Is Called Thinking? Trans. J.  Glenn Gray. New  York: Harper and Row. Patai, Raphael. 1964. Lilith. The Journal of American Folklore 77 (306): 295–314. Thomson, Iain. 2011. Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 6

The Need of the Antichrist to Tame the Wild Tongue of Nosotras Rosario Torres-Guevara

Abstract  Nosotras (female “we” in Spanish) are constantly being robbed of our female being by male discourses. Lars von Trier’s torturous existentialism in Antichrist explores this dynamic through a heterosexual couple that has suffered the loss of their child. Based on the contributions of Gloria Anzaldúa, Simone de Beauvoir, and Silvia Marcos, I reflect on a particular feminist implication from this film: terror is necessary for women to assert their identities. Anzaldúa’s conception of the “wild tongue” speaks to the language and existence of women crossing multiple borders, where keeping their tongues wild is a way of asserting their identities. Antichrist is probably Lars von Trier’s most controversial film, and while some perceive it as misogynistic, I argue, based on my experience of the film as a Latina woman, that the film is subversively feminist. It shows us the impossibility of taming women’s wild tongues by masculinity and ultimately points a finger at society’s hypocrisy in justifying women’s wild tongues as outcomes of demonic possession or neurological disorders.

R. Torres-Guevara (*) Department of Academic Literacy and Linguistics, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Haro, W. H. Koch (eds.), The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24918-2_6

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Keywords  Mesoamerican thought • Female-male duality • Coatlicue state • Womanhood • Terror • Antichrist Her mother tells her being passionate and carefree are not the traits of a good woman. Her daughter is a beautiful young woman in her late teens who loves to dance and socialize. Her personality makes her the subject of gossip in her social circle, thus affecting her chances for a serious suitor and tarnishing her family’s reputation. One day, as usual, she rebels against her parents to let them know she plans to attend another dance party. She tells them she will accept the invitation of the first man to knock on her door—she is quite popular. A gorgeous, elegant man appears at her door, and she is delighted to be his companion. They both dance the night away becoming the center of the party, as everyone envies their beauty and happiness. The man brings her home and hugs her good night. As this happens, he erupts into flames. She screams for help. By the time her mother comes to her aid, the man has disappeared. The young woman’s face is bleeding. The mother remarks that the man was the devil himself and that her daughter has just danced with him. The young woman decides to never go dancing again and enrolls in a convent. Days before moving to the convent, she dies of trauma and despair, her face disfigured. No threat and no form of healing would tame this woman’s wild tongue; she would rather die than attend the convent. Legends like this are popular in my hometown, and some variations of it make it to books about folk tales from the north of Mexico. The point is obvious: to scare girls away from wandering freely in their choices— sexual choices. And although the average girl buys into this legend, let us remember that the carefree young daughter did not submit to the love of God in the end. My hometown is predominantly Catholic as is the rest of Mexico or any other Latin American country. Undoubtedly, this faith is part of my roots. But my land expands beyond any form of Christianity forced upon this soil with the “Conquest.” Thus, Mesoamerican thought is also part of my roots. A subtle—and at times, not so subtle—mix of beliefs and practices that often result in painful contradictions for women. As we are taught to not dance with the devil, we are sexual beings whose appetite deems impossible the destruction of fluidity and duality in nosotras. Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, although not necessarily alluding to Mayan wisdom, reveals the hypocritical—and unrealistic—demands of society and religion on women.

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If one has read The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, it is not hard to discern the connection between it and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. But, as a Latin American, Latina, and Mexican woman, the deep feminist associations I get from this film are intrinsically tied to my experience viewing it. This is the process that led me to conclude that Antichrist holds powerful feminist implications for nosotras. “Nosotras” is the female “we” in Spanish that carries the power of unity in female identification. But, nosotras are constantly being robbed of our female being by male discourses. Lars von Trier’s torturous existentialism in Antichrist explores this dynamic through the chafing intertwining of identities in a heterosexual couple that has suffered the loss of their child. Based on the contributions of Gloria Anzaldúa, Simone de Beauvoir, and Sylvia Marcos, I reflect on a particular feminist implication derived from the film: terror is necessary for women to assert their identities. Anzaldúa’s conception of the “wild tongue”1 speaks to the language of women, and to the being of women, positioned in the borders of mainstream society. She addresses the damage it does to try to tame the wild tongue of women in this position. Women’s sexuality is part of their wild tongues, tongues that cross multiple borders where pride fights shame, pleasure fights pain, beauty fights dirt, where keeping their tongues wild is a way of asserting their identities. Lars von Trier’s depiction of the clitoris in Antichrist is the epitome of this border-crossing condition. The husband, a gifted psychologist, must reconstruct his wife. To do this, he must tame her wild tongue, which entails the whole language of her existence, as she processes grief, guilt, and mental aberrations. Antichrist is probably Lars von Trier’s most controversial film, and some feminists have attacked it as misogynistic (Brooks 2009; Urgan-Sargon 2014), while others have praised it as a useful contribution in feminist theory and practice (Butler and Denny 2016; Honig and Marso 2016; Marso 2017). I argue, based on my experience of the film as a Latina woman, that the film is subversively feminist. It shows us the impossibility of masculinity taming women’s wild tongues, and ultimately points a finger at society’s hypocrisy in justifying women’s wild tongues as outcomes of demonic possession or neurological disorders. Thus, I use Lars von Trier’s Antichrist to confront society’s hypocritical need for the Antichrist to tame the wild tongues of nosotras.

Antichrist Awakes My Wild Tongue The first time I watched Antichrist, it had all the characteristics of a revolting film. I resisted it, unsure why: was it the actors, the storyline? It was making me sick. It was repulsive. As the movie concluded, I thought it was

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just a psychological drama. The film was categorized as a horror movie, so I guess I expected to see scary ghosts and gory killings. Although the film did show these elements, I did not sense them that way. I was not scared, but I was deeply repulsed by the movie. A couple, She and He,2 is grieving the death of their infant son, their guilt consumes them, and they fail to communicate with each other. She has a breakdown, He calms her. She becomes erratic, He is in control. She sees mystical beings, He is rational. She is the student, He is the professor. She is the patient, He is the doctor. Plain and simple; repulsive. My eyes begin to get dry, they hurt. Why do I feel so repulsed by this film? A few hours after I watch this film, my eyes bleed, both of them fully hemorrhaged. I became curious as to why the film so deeply affected me emotionally and physically. So, I view the movie a second time, then a third, and then several. I process the discomfort; my resistance is demolished by Lars von Trier’s unapologetic slap to my face. I am made to confront my womanhood, and the wise women at the end of the film—perceived by the average audience as witches—make me feel at peace. These women seem to release wise discourses, reminding me of the ilamatlatolli.3 In the Nahua tradition, the ilamatlatolli are the traditional discourses on moral codes of collective responsibility provided by the wise old women. The ending of Antichrist rescues my soul. I realize my discomfort is not due to the graphic violent content of physically hurting one another. My discomfort is due to the film’s psychological and spiritual impact on womanhood. I cannot stand the chafing intertwining of identities that destroys She’s and He’s fluidity.4 In a secluded area in the woods, He and She settle in a winter cabin. He isolates her in order to help her heal. Only then, can He tame her erratic behavior, which must spawn from her losing their child and from images of evil entities—She has been working on a doctoral dissertation dealing with witchcraft and misogyny. Lars von Trier toys with the stereotype of the woman as naturally neurotic, easily hysterical, and highly emotional, but he demonstrates these intersect with female power and strength. For von Trier, She is able to confront herself, to see herself, to connect with her being and nature; something He cannot seem to do. For He, there is no opportunity to see neurosis as a possibility for creativity, or for hysteria to be a possibility for uniting the body with mind, or for emotion possibly connecting nature and spirit. For He, She is erratic, She is wild, her tongue no longer makes sense. But, She senses the trap, and She resists. Their female-male duality is interrupted more in He than in She. This, He

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c­ annot grasp. Hence, it will be easier to tame her and reconstruct her in his likeness. In Christianity, as in most dominant traditions, the body is in opposition to the mind. The body binds the inner-self from the external world. In Mesoamerican thought, such separation does not exist. Duality is fluid and present in every being. Bodies are feminine and masculine, complementing and mirroring each other and the universe. In her work on “Embodied Religious Thought: Gender Categories in Mesoamerica,” Sylvia Marcos reviews the conceptualization of the Mesoamerican body, which consists of three animic entities: The tonally, which is the head that travels during sleep at night; The teyolia, which is in the heart and becomes the center of memory, knowledge, and intelligence, and when it leaves the body, death occurs; and The ihiyotl, which is the breath or soplo related to the liver, the vital center of passion and feeling, which can release emanations to hurt others. The vital force of these three centers does not make up the totality of an individual. The body depends on more centers that take and release forces and entities, reflecting the multiplicity of the cosmos. Our body does not limit our inner self from the exterior. On the contrary, it is connected to the cosmos in a fluid duality and not a binary one (Marcos 2000). Lars von Trier’s Antichrist depicts our society’s dominant view of isolating the body from the mind and the cosmos, revealing the hell such rupture entails. Between She and He, only She is strong enough to see this reality and confront it. He is too rational, and He is also a man. To explain what I mean I will use Gloria Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of the Coatlicue state. For Anzaldúa, when a woman circumvents her so-called irrational inner self to appease religious and/or societal demands for women’s rationality and submission, the Coatlicue state will be forced upon her. Anzaldúa comes to this realization when she explores her ancestry, a Nahua ancestry that is highly spiritual. She says, “There in the black, obsidian mirror of the Nahuas is yet another face, a stranger’s face. Simultaneamente me miraba la cara desde distintos angulos. Y mi cara, como la realidad, tenia un caracter multiplice. [Simultaneously, I would look at my face from different angles. And my face, like reality itself, had a multiple character]” (1999, 66). Coatlicue is an earth goddess, mother of the warrior god Huitzilopochtli, among others. She depicts the contradictory; she is “the eagle and the serpent, heaven and the underworld, life and death, mobility and immobility, beauty and horror” (69). Coatlicue is every woman’s “consuming internal whirlwind, the symbol of the underground aspects of

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the psyche. Goddess of birth and death, Coatlicue gives and takes away life; she is the incarnation of cosmic processes” (p. 68). Both Sylvia Marcos and Gloria Anzaldúa highlight the fluidity and duality present in Mesoamerican/Nahua thought. The body cannot be isolated from the mind or cosmos. Nosotras must embrace a Coatlicue state because it will allow our psyche to process past experiences and changes. However, avoiding the Coatlicue means that she will come to nosotras through the darkness, forcing us to “rest.” The Coatlicue state will break the complacency of life and encourage our soul to increase consciousness. We can choose to make meaning from our painful experiences, or we can choose to let them remain meaningless. For Anzaldúa, “the Coatlicue state can be a way station or it can be a way of life” (1999, 70). The Coatlicue state forces itself upon She through darkness, as She had let the rationality imposed by dominant male discourses tame her own wild tongue too long. As an earth goddess, Coatlicue opened and swallowed She, sinking her to dwell in darkness. Anzaldúa says that a woman’s resistance, her refusal to know some truth about herself “brings on that paralysis, depression—brings on the Coatlicue state” (1999, 70). Antichrist encourages me to make these associations, thus opening my own exploration of self as a woman. The film makes me ill because it encourages me to invite a Coatlicue state upon me, and only then can my wild tongue be tamed. Lars von Trier’s She is seeking to make sense of her all. She must cross over: “kicking a hole out of the old boundaries of the self and slipping under or over, dragging the old skin along, stumbling over it” (Anzaldúa 1999, 71). She’s “repressed energy rises, makes decisions, connects with conscious energy and a new life begins. It is her reluctance to cross over, to take that flying leap into the dark, that drives her to escape, that forces her into the fecund cave of her imagination where she is cradled in the arms of Coatlicue, who will never let her go” (71). She’s wild tongue reemerges with energy, but as She has failed to make sense of her tragic loss, He is still a driving force in her being. She, thus, “tremble[s] before the animal, the alien, the sub- or suprahuman, the [She] that has something in common with the wind and the trees and the rocks, that possesses a demon determination and ruthlessness beyond the human” (Anzaldúa, 72). She tries to embrace her Coatlicue state but her limited consciousness takes over in the form of He. Antichrist shows us the impossibility of taming women’s wild tongues by masculinity as it confronts society’s hypocrisy in justifying them as outcomes of demonic possession or neurological disorders. Growing up in a

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Catholic Mexican home, although not religiously diligent, the traditional expectations for women were submission and abnegation. Although my family did not necessarily impose such expectations on me, society at large left its imprint. It was clear that any self-exploration had to relate to the love of God and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Stay submissive, stay a virgin, and God will come to protect you. Stay submissive, stay a virgin, and a man will protect you. As Simone de Beauvoir puts it, “from puberty to menopause [woman] is the principal site of a story that takes place in her and does not concern her personally” (2012, 40). For de Beauvoir, a girl is destined for the male since childhood. She learns to see the man as a sovereign and never to be equal to him. As such, she will only dream of “surpassing her being toward one of those superior beings, of becoming one, of fusing with the sovereign subject” (684). De Beauvoir explains “human love and divine love melt into one not because the latter is a sublimation of the former but because the former is also a movement toward a transcendent, toward the absolute. In any case, the woman in love has to save her contingent existence by uniting with the Whole incarnated in a sovereign Person” (709). Growing up, masturbation, fantasizing, even French-kissing before 18 were all considered sins. And if I had a boyfriend, I had to remember fornication before marriage is a sin. Fornication is only necessary for the purpose of procreating. Pleasure was prohibited for me, not so much for my brothers. My father could cheat on my mom, but God forbid my mother cheated on my father. Did I stick to such rules? Impossible! Since childhood, I knew I was hell-bound. I remember being seven or eight years old when I began exploring my own body, and the bodies of others, with other children around the same age. We played hide and seek, doctor, la casita [the little house], and it all came with touching and feeling. We got naked, we touched our most intimate parts. We kissed. We played with objects and proceeded to insert them in different places. I liked it. I remember feeling and enjoying all this. I could sense my wild tongue desperate to talk. At the end of these exploration games, I would go home and carry a sense of guilt for having failed some god, some holy spirit. One day I made the mistake of confiding this to an adult. It was concluded that some demons must have possessed me. I needed absolution. You make a choice: either you carry the demon or seek absolution. I picked the first. I preferred to continue playing my exploration game, and the more prohibited it got, the more delicious it felt to pursue. An aberration of my being? You bet! Reaching my teenage years was not easy, my constant sense of

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guilt increased my sense of insecurity, and every time I wanted to engage in more exploration, I could only be rescued by evil, by the devil, by accepting that my wild tongue spoke because the Antichrist made it so. It was easy to blame it on that and be forgiven. This is why I was repulsed by Lars von Trier’s Antichrist the first time. It stirred these memories in me as it also awakened my wild tongue, inviting me to enter my Coatlicue state.

Crossing over, Entering into the Serpent I see the heat of anger or rebellion or hope split open that rock, releasing la Coatlicue. And someone in me takes matters into our own hands, and eventually, takes dominion over serpents—over my own body, my sexual activity, my soul, my mind, my weaknesses and strengths. Mine. Ours. Not the heterosexual white man’s or the colored man’s or the state’s or the culture’s or the religion’s or the parents’—just ours, mine. (Anzaldúa 1999, 73)

Western thought sees sex and gender as two separate, divided elements, often promoting male gender as superior to the female gender. Such a view is faulty for this universe. In Mesoamerican thought, duality, equilibrium, and fluidity are integral to the universe and to understanding corporeality. This concept of duality is not fixed or static but constantly changing. Everything, from the divine to the people, to things, to time and space, has fluid duality, constantly shifting between feminine and masculine. This movement permeates all areas of nature and transforms all identity. Dual gender is fundamental in Mesoamerican thought, a pulsating dynamism (Marcos 2000). In Antichrist, the constant friction between She and He’s identities evidences the binary views of Western thought: sex and gender are divided, the body is the boundary to the external world, mind and body are separated, and the male gender is exterior—and superior—to the female. In The Second Sex, Simon de Beauvoir (2012) explains that women are often otherized within a male conceptualization of our world, which propels women to see the world through men. Gloria Anzaldúa (1999) sees this too when she concludes that women’s being, wild tongues, and spirits are erased within male discourses. Lars von Trier confronts us with this reality through She and He’s injured unity. She wants to see the world through He. She accepts, albeit reluctantly, that He can rescue her; She accepts, albeit reluctantly, her position as woman-victim, woman-in-need, in front of He. She rationalizes her guilt recognizing that her desire for sex and

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orgasm was stronger than her taking care of her son. She sees herself through He’s eyes and realizes She must be guilty of her son’s death. She suffers for this sin and He is the only one capable of saving her. For if He forgives her, She can forgive herself. He is her savior. He is her god. For a woman in love, according to de Beauvoir, human love and divine love melt into one because it is a movement toward transcendence, toward the absolute. This woman in love must save her fortuitous existence by “uniting with the Whole incarnated in a sovereign Person” (2012, 684). Antichrist’s She seeks this union. It’s not accidental that Lars von Trier depicts She as an arduous student developing a thesis on witchcraft and misogyny, just as it is not coincidence that the actor who plays He, Willem Dafoe, had been Jesus Christ in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. I believe it was important for Lars von Trier to make these connections to enter the realm of the mystic in Antichrist. Simon de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex links the power of mystic devotion in women to transcending their being. For mystics, she explains, “God cherishes for all eternity the soul he inflames with his love, he shed his blood for her, he prepares splendid apotheoses for her; the only thing she can do is abandon herself to his flames without resistance” (2012, 711). Woman seeks in divine love what she seeks in man’s love: “the apotheosis of her narcissism.” Thus, what mystic women seek is not only transcendence but also “the redemption of their femininity” (de Beauvoir 2012, 713). A woman in love connects with her lover using annihilation and forgetting herself. Echoing de Beauvoir’s interpretations, Lars von Trier’s She’s grief transforms her into a woman mystic who is not satisfied with passively abandoning herself to God. She is ready for self-annihilation by destroying her flesh. But this violating of the flesh has specific characteristics for women: imitate “the Redeemer, who saved flesh by the abasement of his own flesh” (de Beauvoir 2012, 715). She is forced to praise He as God, for She needs salvation. She needs to be forgiven for her sin. In a culture and thought dictated by dichotomies and hierarchies, where women are otherized and male discourses reign, there is no “alternating presence of opposites in motion” as there is, for example, in Nahua thought (Marcos 2000, 107). In a culture like this, the demands of discipline are limited by esteem for carnality and only enriched by esteem for divinity. Lars von Trier empowers She’s wildness within the mystic, which is perceived as an aberration by the average audience. But this mystic wildness—and wilderness—makes all the sense for nosotras. It is commonplace in our tongues. Nailing He’s leg and testicles into a piece of

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wood is Lars von Trier’s depiction of stigmata. She allows her Christ to be sacrificed so that her sins can be forgiven. Only then, can She receive her stigmata as well. She is ready to destroy her flesh in the likeness of her redeemer. Why was this not enough for She or for He? This is the part in the film where Lars von Trier confronts society’s hypocrisy in viewing, explaining, and justifying women’s “wildness” as demonic or neurological disorders. She’s actions can only be explained as demonic—perhaps a consequence of her research on witchcraft. Lars von Trier wants to confront this hypocrisy by deliberately juxtaposing She’s behaviors with the Antichrist, a set of demonic imps, and a group of witches. Lars von Trier shows how She recurs to annihilation because the pressure to want to be is no longer containable for a woman in pain with herself in a patriarchal and binary society. I believe that She is able to finally connect with herself through this process. She is finally able to own herself, her body, her universe. She is possessed and in possession of her Coatlicue state; She enters into the serpent. Spiritual women are scary, mystic women not so much. Spiritual women may not conform to dominant male views, whereas mystic women do. For nosotras, Anzaldúa remarks, “waging war is [our] cosmic duty: The loss of the balanced oppositions and the change to male dominance” (1999, 53). Inviting Nahua thought, Anzaldúa reminds us that before male dominance, “Coatlicue, Lady of the Serpent Skirt, contained and balanced the dualities of male and female, light and dark, life and death” (54). With male dominance ever since Aztecs times, and then the “Conquest,” women united to praise female/dual deities as a form of resistance. The “mazehuales (the common people) continued to worship fertility, nourishment and agricultural female deities, those of crops and rain. They venerated Chalchiuhtlicue (goddess of sweet or inland water), Chicomecoatl (goddess of food), and Huixtocuhuatl (goddess of salt)” (55). Such gatherings freed the woman and distanced her from dominant views. Within a male-dominated society, this collective female spirituality was perceived as pagan superstition. In fact, anything having to do with the spirituality of first people’s wisdom, or in this case, Mesoamerican thought, Western culture has deemed as pagan, witchcraft, primitive, irrational, cults, mythologies, and so on. But for Gloria Anzaldúa, this “‘magical’ mind, the ‘savage’ mind, the participation mystique of the mind … says the world of the imagination—the world of the soul—and of the spirit is just as real as physical reality” (59; emphasis in original).

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Like Sylvia Marcos, Simone de Beauvoir, and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, Anzaldúa points out that institutionalized religion, in this case, Christianity, fails to give meaning to the daily life of a woman, it fails to give meaning to her acts and encounters with life, beauty, and pleasure. The Catholic and Protestant religions encourage fear and distrust of life and of the body; they encourage a split between the body and the spirit and totally ignore the soul; they encourage us to kill off parts of ourselves. We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal; intelligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to ‘real’ events (1999, 59).

Contextualizing She’s life in Antichrist, one concludes She has grown in a society where She does not give “countenance to el mal aigre,5 evil non-human, non-corporeal entities riding the wind” (Anzaldúa 1999, 60). She’s spirit world has been denied by rationality. But as a woman, She is more sensitive to this mystery than He. Nahua thought says that when nosotras resist looking into our dark side, the dark side will force itself upon us. She’s pain takes her into the Coatlicue state. The crucifixion and the stigmata are not adequate to approach She’s universe, because this is based on a faulty, non-dual, non-fluid, view of our being on this earth. Thus, She must enter into the serpent. Her tongue is wild and very awake. “Rattler fangs filled [She’s] mouth, scales covered [her] body. In the morning [She] saw through snake eyes, felt snake blood course through [her] body. The serpent, [her] tono, [her] animal counterpart. She was immune to its venom. Forever immune” (Anzaldúa 1999, 48). For the Olmecs, the serpent’s mouth with sharp teeth resembles womanhood, what Anzaldúa calls “vagina dentata” (1999, 56). Perceived as a sacred place on earth, a refuge, the serpent’s mouth, or vagina dentata, is “the creative womb from which all things were born and to which all things returned” (Anzaldúa 1999, 56). Lars von Trier’s She cuts her clitoris as a way of receiving stigmata, as a way to pay for her sin for killing her son, as a way to punish the tongue that had taken her into wilderness that tragic night. Although I first experience this moment in the film superficially and simply assume that She is being crazy and irrational, I now begin to see the profundity of its implication. I cannot help but associate this with the Olmec conceptualization of the serpent’s mouth. “The destiny of humankind is to be devoured by the Serpent” (Anzaldúa 1999, 56). She has to cross over and enter the serpent.

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Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed, They Can Only Be Cut (Anzaldúa 1999) Women’s sexuality, therefore, is part of their wild tongues, wild tongues that cross multiple borders where pride fights shame, pleasure fights pain, beauty fights dirt, where keeping their tongues wild is a way of asserting their identities. Lars von Trier’s depiction of the clitoris in Antichrist is the epitome of this border-crossing condition. She is a symbol of the dark sexual drive; she is also the “chthonic of creativity, the basis of all energy and life” (Anzaldúa, 1999, 57). Her Coatlicue state breaks She into a serpent goddess of creation, war, birth, and death, just as she is also an antecedent of la Llorona, the female mother spirit that howls and weeps for her dead children. To enter the serpent, She understands that what was “caused by the serpent must be cured by the serpent” (Anzaldúa 1999, 68). She mutilates her snake, her wildest tongue; defeating the dangerous teeth, she crosses over and enters into the serpent. Although Lars von Trier might have not been influenced by Nahua wisdom in Antichrist, the film certainly offers room to make these associations. Lars von Trier is aware that women are oppressed, otherized, and fragmented. He challenges his audience to rethink mainstream discourses constructed within our patriarchal society. In Antichrist, Lars von Trier alludes to social constructions that position the woman in lower positions, perpetuate male dominance, and dichotomize our being. Von Trier knows that nosotras are “robbed of our female being by the masculine plural” (Anzaldúa 1999, 76). Male dominance dwells in religious practices permeating all corners of our society. Under the pretense of modernity, some societies want to promote the idea that women are now equal to men. Lars von Trier’s depiction of She and He, a young, modern, professional, and atheist couple, let us see this hypocrisy. Antichrist allows me to conclude that He and She are deprived of fluid duality. Whatever She does when confronting herself is an aberrant spawn of evil. Her body and mind must remain divided for her to be well. Antichrist confronts me with this reality. This is the present status quo for nosotras. I recognize this is where my intense discomfort originated. I have escaped my own fluid duality and spirituality too long, rationalizing and accepting dichotomy, division, and hierarchy in my womanhood. Antichrist awakes my wild tongue. After I watched Antichrist for the second time, and the many times that followed, I invited my Coatlicue state to set in, I let my tongue be wild. I processed my pain, the things that I have considered true since childhood, mostly the things that have hurt me, encouraging feelings of pain,

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i­ nsecurity, and self-hatred. Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac and Melancholia also shake my entrails. But Antichrist swallows me whole. Perhaps stronger than other feminists resources I have encountered in my learning, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist presents a uniqueness of its own: it defies me to rethink my childhood and my growing up, my womanhood, and it makes me stronger. Writing this essay, in fact, was a revolting experience. As I think of words to process my defense of this film as subversively feminist, I go back to the times when I was made to believe I was kissing the devil, or when demons must have caused me to have sex with men that did not deserve me, or whenever my erratic behaviors would be momentary possessions of el mas alla. I grew up in a house whose patio wall was annexed to a cemetery. Don’t go too close, el muerto se te sube [the dead will hunt you]. Be contained, be quiet, be pretty. Fortunate to have been fostered by hard-working and highly independent aunts and mother,6 who I thought were ahead of their time, I was able to understand the power of my dark inner self always ready to embrace me, accepting myself as the dual and fluid being that I am, and letting my tongue be wild. A woman’s wild tongue is her whole being, from her clitoris to her liver, to her heart, to her head. But women’s wild tongues cannot be natural, they must be spawned by terroristic esoteric forces, and as such, can only be tamed by the Antichrist. Lars von Trier shows how dominant views in our society frame the terror as justification for women’s “aberrations.” It is present in every movie—a simple search for protagonists in horror films will find that women are the most possessed, in need of exorcism, in need of healing. But this is not as simple for Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, where He reads She as sick, but She reads herself as self-­ sufficient. Lars von Trier’s torturous existentialism in Antichrist points out deep realities for nosotras Latinas: terror is necessary for women to assert their identities. Anzaldúa’s conception of the “wild tongue” speaks to the language of women, and to the being of women, positioned in the borders of mainstream society. She addresses the damage it does to try to tame the wild tongue of women in this position. Antichrist’s She speaks a wild tongue, She is a wild tongue, and a wild tongue cannot be tamed, it can only be cut. Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is subversively feminist. It is a film for nosotras; it is a film that invites nosotras to welcome our Coatlicue state. It shows us the impossibility of taming women’s wild tongues by masculinity, and ultimately confronts society’s hypocrisy in viewing a man’s ­wildness as an outcome of the nature of masculinity, while a woman’s wildness is an outcome of terror.

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Notes 1. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza book chapter, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” she shares an experience with a dentist’s office whose work cannot be completed because of Anzaldúa’s stubborn tongue—her tongue keeps getting in the way, exacerbating the dentist. Anzaldúa uses this as a metaphor to reflect on her mother tongue, her native language, and her identity as a Chicana woman. She reflects on memories of her growing up facing a dominant culture that deemed her tongue and her ethnicity wild. As a woman, and as a Chicana woman, she learns to own up to this conception of her tongue, her identity, and womanhood. She takes possession of her wilderness and will not be tamed. 2. She and He are the names of the couple in the film. There is no proper name for She or He. As such, this chapter uses these pronouns as they are used in the film. 3. In Nahua thought, the ilamatlatolli were the traditional discourses of the wise old. 4. Fluidity, in Nahua thought, is conceptualized as the constant movement of duality in every being or object, including divinity and the cosmos. Everything is feminine and masculine, and the order of duality was balanced through ollin—constant motion. This fluidity leads to equilibrium, which is reached by constantly connecting to the center of the cosmos and coordinating our being in relation to it (Marcos 2000). 5. Literally, mal aigre in English translates as “bad air.” But the spelling of “aigre” is not orthographically correct in Spanish. I suspect Gloria Anzaldúa uses this specific spelling to imply the use of such term in societies, which may have lacked literacy in castellan, but which were highly spiritual, and whose practices were influenced by indigenous wisdoms. As pointed out in the text, el mal aigreS meant the evil riding the winds. 6. My mother has nine sisters. Although these women may have not been familiar with the Mesoamerican conceptualization of duality, or Anzaldúa’s Coatlicue state, my mother and aunts are women with magnificent ollin, always shifting between their feminine and masculine. Although still embedded in certain forms of machismo, their self-sufficiency is extremely significant for me, for it allowed me the freedom to explore so much learning.

References Anzaldúa, G. 1999. Borderlands, la Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Brooks, X. 2009. Antichrist: A Work of Genius or the Sickest Film in the History of Cinema? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/ jul/16/antichrist-lars-von-trier-feminism. Accessed 18 Oct 2018.

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Butler, R., and D. Denny, eds. 2016. Lars von Trier’s Women. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. De Beauvoir, S. 2012. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage. Honig, B., and L.J.  Marso, eds. 2016. Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marcos, S. 2000. Embodied Religious Thought: Gender Categories in Mesoamerica. In Gender/Bodies/Religions, ed. S. Marcos. Cuernavaca, Mexico: Aler Publications. Marso, L.J. 2017. Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Urgan-Sargon, B. 2014. Sometimes a Misogynist Is Just a Misogynist: Don’t Excuse Lars von Trier. Tablet. https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/167949/ sometimes-a-misogynist-is-just-a-misogynist. Accessed 18 Oct 2018.

CHAPTER 7

Lars von Trier: Traversing the Fantasy of the Child William H. Koch

Abstract  In his chapter, William Koch argues that many of the central themes of Lars von Trier’s films can be understood in light of the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and Lee Edelman’s extension of those ideas. Specifically, the theme of the death or sacrifice of the child can be interpreted in light of the contrast between fantasy and the Death Drive. This allows for a reading of the Depression Trilogy and most of the Golden Heart Trilogy that hinges on the response of the main characters to the death or life of the child who forms the hidden central spoke of the plot. Keywords  Lacan • Drive • Antichrist • Melocholia • Medea • Synthhomosexual Furious and seeking revenge—a father rides a horse, accompanied by two hunting dogs, away from a tree containing the hanged bodies of his two sons. Behind him, his second wife is dead along with his hope for future children. In the distance, his first wife who had hanged his children sits in W. H. Koch (*) Department of Academic Literacy and Linguistics, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Haro, W. H. Koch (eds.), The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24918-2_7

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a boat that slowly begins to slide out to sea. He is Jason of the Argonauts. She is Medea. We think he is riding away from the tree, but suddenly he is back where he began, back with the dead bodies of his children. No matter how he tries, he cannot get away from the tree and to Medea. Jason circles the tree bearing the bodies of his dead sons as his dogs collapse in exhaustion, then his horse. We see him stumbling back and forth in the waving grass at the foot of the tree. He falls, he crawls, he rages at the sky and pulls his sword, but still he only moves back and forth in the grass surrounding the tree and the bodies of his children as Medea slips away. Though wracked with grief herself, Medea pulls off the tight skullcap she has worn throughout the movie and frees her hair in the breeze. These are the concluding images from Lars von Trier’s rendition of Medea, based on a script by Carl-Theodor Dreyer. Von Trier had created his own version of “Medea” (1987) long before he made the movies Breaking the Waves (1996) and Dancer in the Dark (2000), which brought him international fame. When I first realized this movie existed I was struck by how much of his work could be understood as investigations of the “Medea” story from different perspectives and angles. Almost his entire collection of works, it seemed to me, could be understood through the lens of “Medea.” His themes of woman as victim, as sacrifice, and as monster can all be found there, but so too can the theme I would like to consider here, namely the figure of the dead or doomed child. It seems to me that von Trier approaches the theme of the child from a heavily Lacanian direction, one in which the child is united to the topic of fantasy, desire, and the Death Drive. I’ll briefly lay out the necessary aspects of Lacan’s system here to prepare us to add a discussion of von Trier’s so-called Depression Trilogy (which consists of Antichrist, Melancholia, and Nymphomaniac) to our analysis of the end of Medea. As I work through the key Lacanian ideas, please keep in mind the image of Jason stuck circling the tree from which hang the bodies of his dead children. Both Freud and Lacan understand the foundation of human psychology to be a force that impels all our action and thought. They call this force the Drive, or sometimes the Death Drive. In Freud the Drive is first identified with the compulsion to repeat found in cases of trauma as well as the basic play of children. Freud considers the compulsion to repeat to be a basic characteristic of all biological life, it is “…an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things” (Freud 2008, 244). The repetitive urge of the Drive provides a type of enjoyment that Lacan calls jouissance. The Drive itself does not aim at anything specific that could satisfy it other than

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its own repetition; it is the drive to enjoyment through repetition without the possibility of consummation. The Drive and its jouissance give rise, however, to the full collection of goal or object directed desires that structure the more obvious characteristics of our mental and social lives. The means by which we move from objectless Drive to object-­directed desire is fantasy. Fantasy channels the circular, or goalless, pulse of the Drive toward specific objects by presenting the myth that something specific can, at last, satisfy the insistence of the Drive. From within our fantasy-structured everyday view, the Drive appears as an unquenchable need, the satisfaction of which we are always hunting. For this reason Lacan often presents it as a force circling around a gap, a basic constitutive loss, but this experience of a lack is itself the creation of the Drive’s own continual satisfaction through insistence alone (Lacan 1981, 1991, 1999, 2007). The most basic structure of fantasy has a temporal characteristic, specifically it is future directed. Fantasy tells us that something specific, to be achieved or worked toward, will finally provide the fulfillment the Drive constantly lacks. Thus, desire for this object is born from the Drive. Fantasy is fundamentally the belief that the future will satisfy the Drive. As Lee Edelman makes clear in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Edelman 2004), this future-oriented characteristic of fantasy takes as its easiest object the image of the Child. According to fantasy, the Drive of the parent, or society in general, will achieve satisfaction in the Child. It is this future-­oriented nature of fantasy that grounds the demand for sacrifice within the human psyche. The Drive itself is satisfied, as far as it can be, in its very insistence; but fantasy and the satisfaction of the desire it creates demand postponement and self-denial for the sake of the future. Society’s foundation in self-sacrifice is born from fantasy’s illusion that the Drive can be satisfied if we sacrifice satisfaction (i.e. jouissance) today in preference for the future achievement of the object of desire, such as our children. The complex of fantasy and desire also overlaps with the Oedipus complex through which the Drive is understood by Lacan to revolve around the missing object lost in castration. The future oriented goals that are the outcome of fantasies of fulfillment are diverse replacements for the original loss experienced in the Oedipus complex and all desire is ultimately the desire to no longer be castrated in Lacan’s sense. From this perspective we can understand the Oedipus complex as the primary fantasy that identifies a lost object that could satisfy the Drive. This means that the entire complex of fantasy and desire is built on our feeling of being harmed in the past through primary castration, and as a result, remaining incomplete and

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broken in the present. This results in future goals always being tinted with the light of revenge and resentment. This is the classic neurotic psychic complex that, from a societal standpoint, is normal and seen as healthy. Lacan calls the goal and successful outcome of analysis for neurotic patients “traversing the fantasy.” Traversing the fantasy occurs when the analysand comes to realize that desire was never really about the goals it seemed to aim at and, further, that they are not suffering from some primary loss at the hands of others that can be amended by achieving any future object of desire. We are not victims of a primordial wrong that has left us incomplete; rather, the perfectly normal objectless nature of the Drive and its jouissance has been concealed beneath fantasy and desire. If the figure of the Child is one of the primary forms the object of fantasy takes, then the sacrifice of the child is a potential symbol of traversing the fantasy. It can represent the moment when we become able to engage in jouissance, or the enjoyment of the pursuit of goals for the sake of the pursuit and not the goal, without illusions of incompleteness and victimhood. In Jason, caught endlessly circling around the lost object of his fantasies about the future, we catch sight of the perpetual cycle of the Drive in the space of the lost primordial object. When Jason’s future (in the form of the new wife he rejected Medea and his children for) is destroyed, he is reduced to the level of the Death Drive without having actually traversed the fantasy and reached a point where he can embrace jouissance. Indeed, his failures to escape from the level of the Drive and to recognize or traverse it likely ends in his death, as hinted at by his final collapse at the foot of the tree. Without traversing the fantasy, being reduced to the level of the Drive has the characteristic of obsessive mindless repetition and self-­ destruction. Medea, on the other hand, while certainly not happy as her ship sails away from her past, does represent a symbol of sad freedom. She too has lost the objects of her fantasies and desires—first in losing Jason and her new home and then in killing her children—but now she is at least free from the illusion of fulfillment coming from achieved objects of desire. These two figures, Jason caught at the foot of the tree circling around the dead bodies of his children and Medea slipping into the distance with her hair free, represent the two outcomes of the death of the child that von Trier presents. Either one is reduced to the level of the Death Drive without having traversed the fantasy or one is freed from the tyranny of self-­ sacrifice and the future. There is as well a third figure that never invests in future-oriented fantasies and remains at the level of the Drive without any

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mediation from desire. This figure is identified by Lee Edelman, as the synthomosexual and is found in such characters as Scrooge from Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. Scrooge engages in cycles of acquisition without coherent reference to future goals and, in doing so, endangers the very existence of the child as represented by Tiny Tim. This is also how the homosexual has been frequently viewed, one who is engaging in pleasure or jouissance without reference to a goal-directed future represented by the production of the child. As Edelman points out, the militarizing of so-called family values against homosexuality is a rather direct manifestation of the view that anyone refusing to sacrifice their own satisfaction for the sake of future children is a threat to the entire edifice of the fantasy we call society. In queer relationships, neurotic society sees the specter of the Drive, in the face of which they fight to maintain a system of self-sacrifice for the sake of desire. We can understand the Depression Trilogy, made up of Antichrist, Melancholia, and Nymphomaniac, as consisting of three different approaches to the death of the child. Antichrist begins with it. Melancholia ends with it. Nymphomaniac is largely about the non-birth of the child and, later, the price of adding the child and replacing jouissance with desire and fantasy in the psyche of the synthomosexual. I’ll begin by discussing Antichrist, which begins with a scene that perfectly fits our Lacanian analysis and immediately introduces us to the timeless pleasure of the Drive versus the goal-directed fantasy. The couple, who are the main characters of the story, are engaged in passionate sex while their child crawls out the window and falls to its death. Their present-­ oriented pleasure sacrifices the future-oriented child. In this death they both are reduced to the level of the Drive. The entire movie overlaps with the image of Jason stuck circling the tree of his dead children. The couple never escape this circling around the body of their dead child. The overlap with Jason in Medea is reinforced when, in chapter three of the movie, the couple have violent sex at the base of a dead tree where bodies are interwoven with the tree itself. One of the main structures of the Antichrist is the husband’s commitment to provide psychological treatment to his wife, who is suffering from the trauma of her child’s death, on his own. His treatment consists of bringing her to face her fears. The husband determines that her primary fear is nature and so they retreat to an isolated cabin in the woods. The rest of the movie can be read as an extended meditation on a certain image of nature—nature as the Death Drive. Because the Drive is focused on

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present pleasure rather than future concerns, it can often be self-­destructive. It sacrifices a personal future for a present enjoyment. The hallucinogenic representatives of nature experienced in the movie carry a similar characteristic. Early on, for example, the husband meets a fox that is disemboweling itself and states that “Chaos reigns,” as indeed it must without any future-oriented structure. The self-disemboweling reflects the sense in which an investment in current satisfaction is understood to take place at the expense of one’s future existence and, therefore, one’s survival into the future. Consider, in this regard, the traditional description of masturbation as “self-abuse.” This is one sense in which the Drive is a Death Drive, as its total absorption in the present is understood to be unsustainable and thus self-destructive on any temporal scale beyond the present. On the one hand, this understanding of the movie as taking place at the level of the Drive is unsurprising. What first hinted at the nature of the Death Drive for Freud was that trauma tends to take the form of an obsessive repetition or reliving of traumatic experience. Trauma frequently reduces us to the level of the Drive. However, as the movie descends further into horror, the husband comes to realize that the wife had been torturing their son by putting his shoes on the wrong feet and, later, she remembers having watched her child climb to the window and done nothing. While the memory might be inaccurate, the shoe torture is real, and in either case we are meant to notice that the Drive is active throughout our lives even if sublimated beneath fantasy. There is always an aspect of resentment involved in the need to suppress present pleasure for future goals that might return to us what we feel has been stolen through castration. To traverse the fantasy is to escape from this resentment toward our own goals that so often results in self-sabotage and, as in the case of the dead child, sabotage of others caught in our fantasies. Neither the husband nor the wife is suffering from something that happened to them, but rather uncovering the nature hidden beneath their previous façade of normality. The husband, attempting to play the patriarchal role of a new Oedipus to restructure his wife’s Drive back toward normal neurotic fantasy and desire, ends up being literally castrated by her. Eventually their inability to escape from the level of the Drive or accept the sacrifice of their child and the fantasies attached to him destroys them both. Like Jason they circle the dead body of their child until they themselves die and never traverse their fantasies sufficiently to escape like Medea. In the character of Justine, Melancholia shows us someone reduced to the level of the Drive while surrounded by those engaged in normal

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neurosis. At first Justine’s reduction to the Drive through her bout with ­crippling depression takes the form of a systematic destruction on her part of her own wedding reception and new marriage.1 Justine’s story would have been just another story of a person reduced to the Drive were it not for an intervening event. A wandering planet drifts toward the earth, an event that the healthy neurotics are sure will result in nothing serious. Of course, they are wrong and the planet doubles back after passing the earth on a trajectory destined to destroy the entire planet. The neurotics react as one might expect, with panic and suicide as their fantasies about the future collapse around them. Only Justine is unaffected, for her previous reduction to the Drive has given her something of a head start. Already she had lost her future-oriented fantasies and as the entire world is reduced to the level of the Drive, she shows up as the only sane one able to live without a future. From the level of the Drive, the same level at which the Antichrist takes place, Justine is able to state that the death of the planet is good because life itself is evil—evil perhaps because it is not really honestly directed toward any concern with the future. The suicide of Justine’s brother-in-law and the terrifying panic of Justine’s sister in the presence of Justine’s young nephew make clear that the parents never really cared about the child himself but only about the future he represented. Without the future the child can no longer play the role of the object of fantasy; he is just a young human being and no longer a suture on the sense of lack inherent in the neurotics. By the end of the movie, Justine, alone, has traversed the fantasy and thus is able to appreciate that the promise of the future was always an impossible fantasy. This allows her to be the only character to show real sympathy to the frightened boy and to enjoy the last few minutes of earth’s history with him in building a magical tent that, she tells him, will protect them. There is, in this, a sense of childlike enjoyment—an enjoyment of jouissance without fantasy or hope for a future. Here we find Medea redeemed, having traversed the fantasy and sacrificed the symbol of the child, while preserving the actuality of the child as an entity capable of fear and suffering. The final film of the trilogy, Nymphomaniac, consists of two volumes and is too complex a work to deal with at all adequately, even in the schematic way I have addressed the previous films. I will be content with pointing out a few important thematic elements that tie into our Lacanian analysis. The main character, Joe, is a self-described nymphomaniac, which is one of the main forms of synthomosexuality, that is, someone without the

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prop of fantasy and desire, who instead exists trapped in the compulsive objectless pursuit of jouissance. While the focus on the child shows up at the start of the Antichrist and end of Melancholia, it arrives in the center of Nymphomaniac when Joe has given up her pursuit of objectless pleasure to instead live with one of her past lovers in a manner much more traditionally oriented toward the futurity of building a life together. This decision to give up her previous life coincides with her discovery that she can no longer feel anything. In other words, her loss of jouissance is very explicit. She both chooses to give it up while also discovering any aspect of pleasure, even that stolen in the course of the normal pursuit of fantasy-­ oriented desire, is lost to her. Shortly after this, she discovers that she is pregnant. Joe at this point leads a double life, on the one hand having a child with her partner and on the other hand seeking through more and more extreme sexual encounters to re-achieve her access to sexual pleasure and jouissance. Finally she does regain access to pleasure through engaging in masochistic experiences. She breaks off her relationship, and her child is sent to live with a foster family. She has sacrificed the child in her own way, without ever having really been invested in him, and definitively rejected any future-oriented fantasy by returning to the level of the Death Drive and jouissance. What we see in Joe is the story that would play out had the story of Scrooge shown us his response two or three years after his experience with the ghosts. Hanging out with the Kratchet children and experiencing the general love of humanity has finally begun to pale. Imagine Scrooge longing for the satisfaction his previous money-making greed had won him, and realizing that his redemption is ultimately unfulfilling. Having once seen the reality beneath the social props of fantasy and future-­ oriented desire, our imagined older Scrooge and Joe are both unable to be fully convinced by the fairytales of self-sacrifice that keep normal people pacified. In Antichrist, the main female character asserts that women are evil and the overall film presents nature, which is frequently identified with the female, as evil as well. Melancholia features the main female lead asserting that life is evil. In each of these cases, I suspect that “evil” can be understood in terms of lacking an honest and self-sacrificing commitment to the future, such as would exist were fantasy real rather than a veneer over the reality of the Drive. Nature, women, and life are evil because in actuality they are Drive. In Nymphomaniac, the message might be that men, as well as the world in general, is evil insofar as it is so willing to take advantage of those caught in the Drive, the synthomosexuals, while at the same time

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officially rejecting them. We see this clearly in the dramatic end of the movie in which the pious virgin host, who has been privy to Joe’s entire story, attempts to take advantage of her nymphomania. We see clearly here the world’s willingness to feed off the sacrifice of the child while, at the same time, turning its pious head in horror. Having established that the sacrifice of the child and its relation to the Drive is a powerful fulcrum for understanding the Depression Trilogy, it might be useful to extend this reading briefly to some of von Trier’s other films. The two that most immediately lend themselves to this reading are found within the earlier Golden Heart Trilogy that first began to bring von Trier international acclaim. Specifically we will concern ourselves with The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark. The Idiots depicts a group of people who attempt to escape from social conventions by pretending that they have developmental disabilities. For our purposes, this overtly horrifying practice is an attempt to reject social desires and future orientation (the characters neglect their jobs and are encouraged to act in ways that directly damage their social positions and relationships). The characters are trying to arrive at the level from which the Drive’s pure satisfaction can be enjoyed. This becomes all the clearer when its leader, in the attempt to release the “inner idiot” of the group, demands an orgy. The hurtful and self-destructive indulgences of the group present one common depiction of the self-indulgent synthomosexual pursuing the Drive without the prop of acceptable social fantasy and desire. However, what the film ultimately shows us is that all but one of the members fails to ever really achieve the level of the Drive and they are, at best, pathetically pantomiming it. The one exception to this failed attempt to achieve escaping the desire through traversing the fantasy occurs in the character of Karen, and constitutes the heart-breaking culmination of the film. At the start of the film, Karen is not, in fact, a member of the group or aware of what they are doing. She is eating at a restaurant where a few of their members show up, and she is drawn into their act without recognizing it as such. Once she becomes aware of what they are doing, she nonetheless remains with them, both fascinated by and critical of their behavior. At the end of the movie, it is her turn to go to a place where people know her and play the role of the “idiot.” She goes home and we discover that she has been missing for several days and that her family thought she was dead. More than this, however, we discover that she had joined the group shortly after her infant son’s death and that she had missed his funeral. Her husband

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observes that this shows that she just didn’t care. He, at least, thinks that she has sacrificed the child in our sense. In reality she, like the female main character from Antichrist, has been reduced to the level of the Drive by the death of her child without having truly traversed or escaped the fantasy-­desire complex. From this view, it becomes clear that her fascination with “the idiots” reflects a recognition that what they are seeking she is already trapped within—a world devoid of meaningful social fantasies. For this reason, she appears as poignantly sincere when she dribbles her food at dinner with her family in the same manner that other members of the group mimic disability. Far from some ecstatic rebellion, Karen’s loss of fantasy and social convention is the result of trauma and mourning with which Freud was so familiar. It is an injury, a collapse, and not an escape. Unlike the other movies we have considered, in Dancer in the Dark, the child does not die either symbolically or actually. Rather, Dancer in the Dark presents the standard social fantasy that traditionally sublimates and hides the Drive—as such it is a masterpiece of sacrifice. Selma, the main character, is slowly losing her vision from a degenerative disease that her son also suffers from. She saves all the money she earns from working in a factory in order to pay for a surgery that will save her son’s vision. This is the first component of self-sacrifice in Selma’s character. Her entire life is directed not toward curing her own blindness or living an even moderately comfortable life, but rather toward curing the blindness of her son. As her vision is failing, she slips more and more into a fantasy world in which her life is a musical. Here we see in a very overt, even caricatured, manner the key aspects of the fantasy-desire complex. Selma’s life is dedicated entirely to her son’s future, this is her one main desire, and is shot through with rich fantasies that make this life of perpetual denial and sacrifice tolerable. Ultimately Selma’s money is stolen and, in the process of getting it back, she kills the thief who is also her friend and next-door neighbor. She takes her money back and deposits it with the specialists who will perform the eye surgery on her son. Then, when she is arrested, she refuses to fully explain her actions and claims she had been sending all of her money oversees to her family in order to protect the money she had spent for her son’s surgery. When her friends get the money back and use it to hire a defense attorney, she is enraged and refuses the lawyer. Ultimately she is hung right after she is informed that her son has successfully had his surgery. Her entire life is sacrificed, amidst the mist of fantasy, to her son’s future. Selma, far from traversing the fantasy, sacrificing the child, or being reduced to

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the level of the Drive, lives out her entire story as the perfectly normal and healthy neurotic—completely committed to sacrificing everything for the future that is embodied in her son. What I would like to stress, in conclusion, is the manner in which this Lacanian understanding of the work of Lars von Trier adds a liberatory aspect to his works that is often overlooked. It is clear Lars von Trier has an interest in the topic of sacrifice, especially the sacrifice of women. As pointed out so clearly by West Gurley in this volume,2 this focus of his work has often been seen as misogynistic or ambiguous. From our reading it is possible to see von Trier offering a redemptive vision of how we might free ourselves from the trap of masochistic self-sacrifice for the sake of fantasies. Selma, fully enmeshed in fantasy, is doomed to sacrifice. Medea may have to kill her children to free herself and Joe’s lack of any investment in fantasy may be destined to be used by a hypocritical society, but Justine is able to live without fantasy and empathetically embrace the child as a real human capable of suffering rather than as an object with which to fill some inner lack. In the female main characters of Antichrist and The Idiots, on the other hand, we see the cost of losing fantasy without having recognized its illusory nature. But the final message of this spectrum of situations is clear, there is the possibility of a Medea free from the tyranny of sacrifice who, having traversed the fantasy, is able to truly appreciate the child as child rather than as an object of fantasy and desire. Indeed, any “non-evil” life would have to be open to sincere sympathy for others beyond the narcissism of fantasy which reduces others to simply objects we hope might fill the wound left behind by a fundamental lack within ourselves. True concern for others as others, rather than objects of desire, requires us to traverse the fantasy. Lars von Trier’s films suggest that we can become Medea, free from the need to sacrifice the real child to escape the tyranny of the fantasy child.

Notes 1. Justine’s self-destructive behavior on the night of her wedding offers several key hints at its Drive-like characteristics. She engages in several thoughtless self-gratifying actions such as urinating in a garden in the open air and meaningless sex with a stranger. 2. West Gurley “The Ass I Kick Today May Be the Ass I’ll Have to Kiss Tomorrow: What’s Up with the Sacrifice of Women in the Films of Lars von Trier?”

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References Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press Books. Freud, Sigmund. 2008. The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. James Strachey. London: Random House. Lacan, Jacques. 1981. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton. ———. 1991. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego In Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacquess-Alain Miller. New York: Norton. ———. 1999. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan. Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton. ———. 2007. Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton.

CHAPTER 8

Melancholia’s End Timothy Holland

Abstract  Through an examination of the planetary disaster organizing Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, this essay probes both the stakes of depicting the end of the world and the competency of those in the humanities to undertake such analysis. At bottom, the following draws on Jacques Derrida’s 1984 “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” as well as more contemporary discussions of Melancholia, in order to accentuate the singularity of the film’s ending, the “necessary” fictional status of the total apocalypse, and the capacity of those who study the expansive literary archive to engage with “real-world” matters. Keywords  Apocalypse • Jacques Derrida • Cinema studies • The humanities • Melancholia • Lars von Trier If there is common thread that seems to unite nearly every piece of criticism addressing Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), it is that the film pushes up against, and eventually resists, neat generic classification. Melancholia is frequently read as a disaster film without proper or conventional disaster; in contrast to the overwhelming majority of movies that T. Holland (*) Department of Film and Media Studies, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Haro, W. H. Koch (eds.), The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24918-2_8

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depict cataclysmic events, Melancholia is a film about the end of the world that features the absence of Earth’s spectacular destruction. And yet, the film’s comparatively modest or unorthodox rendering of its catastrophe (by Hollywood, blockbuster standards) speaks to something so ruinous that it remains, following Maurice Blanchot (1986), perhaps unthinkable: this disaster leaves no survivors. Nothing—no one—follows Melancholia’s end. Von Trier avoids the post-apocalyptic rejuvenations and hopeful new world orders that repeatedly organize films about the end of the world; his film’s ending precludes the possibility of testimony that would provide the limits of an event that only partially obliterates the world. The singularity of this apocalypse is its unimaginable totality. Given the Greek roots and Biblical nuances of the term apokalyptein as revelation, one could say that what makes Melancholia exemplary as a quasi-disaster film is that it remarks not only what Christopher Peterson describes as “an apocalypse without apocalypse”—or an ending without prophetic redemption or disclosure of absolute truth—but also the privileged relationship that cinema has forged with envisioning the destruction of the world (408). Regarding the latter consideration, I am speaking less about the often-discussed moralistic, cathartic, sadistic, and/or masochistic allures of encountering, and thus surviving, disasters as a film viewer, safe at a distance as it were, protected by the shelter of theater and the virtual images projected on the screen. Rather, following Jacques Derrida’s comments on the possibility of total nuclear annihilation in his 1984 essay “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” my contribution to this anthology on the films of Lars von Trier seeks to reaffirm the essential literary, and by extension, cinematic, nature of the “apocalypse without apocalypse,” as well as the competency of those affiliated with the humanities to address and analyze subjects that may seem, at first blush, beyond the purview of their disciplines, particularly if the objects taken up by those disciplines are hastily judged to be “textual” as opposed to “factual.” Suffice it to say here that von Trier’s disaster film, perhaps more than any other cinematic work associated with the film genre it at once engages and defies, illustrates that the total apocalypse is—as Derrida articulates—a referent without actual reference; it is a catastrophe that has no verifiable precedent and so, for the moment, remains completely fictional, “an event whose advent,” he says “…remains to be invented” (394). Ultimately, I’d like to suggest that one of the initial questions or subjects posed in Derrida’s essay in 1984 is just as pressing today amid renewed nuclear tensions, the rise of reactionary populist

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movements throughout the West, xenophobia, and the unprecedented threats of elimination faced by the humanities as a response to the demands of global marketplace. Who is competent to think, address, and take on the threat of end of the world? Given the numerous arguments for and against the “usefulness” of the humanities in the world today, how does the total apocalypse, such as the one that Melancholia uniquely provides and stages for its viewers, reconfigure presumptions of the utility of those fields often deemed impractical? Melancholia can be read to orbit around a confluence of doubles, of things riven in two. Structurally, the film itself is divided into two parts— Part I: Justine and Part II: Claire—named after the two sisters in the film, played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, respectively. Von Trier also divides Melancholia stylistically: the initial eight minutes features a 16-shot, slow motion, highly symbolic, non-narrative sequence, while the majority of the film progresses chronologically in a jumpy, handheld documentary style, which, as Steven Shaviro (2012) points out, recalls many of the films that adhered to the Dogme 95 manifesto. Most notable is the film’s title and its reference to two things at once: both the rogue planet that ends up destroying Earth and Justine’s debilitating psychological condition that prevents her from conforming to the demands of the world within which she finds herself. This doubling, combined with von Trier’s own commentary about Melancholia as well as his well-documented battle with depression, invites literal and allegorical readings of the film. Is Melancholia about the actual end of the world or, should we follow von Trier when he says that the film began “with a state of mind” (2011)—is it cosmic or subjective, public or private? Can these conditions be properly disserved?1 The antinomies constituting Melancholia, the doubles and pairs around which the film revolves, produce the oscillations of its critical reception. Articles and essays addressing the film, in one way or another, tend to mimic the oppositional couples that arrange the diegesis. Despite the fact it denies its viewers the spectacular devastation (and resulting aftermath) of most disaster films, Melancholia does not entirely refrain from depicting the annihilation of the world. Earth’s collision with Melancholia occurs exactly twice in the film, and they both fittingly serve as concluding or sequence ending shots of the film’s stylized overture and of the more realistically portrayed latter portion. The two ends are different repetitions of the other. As a distinctive viewpoint and experience of the same apocalypse, the film’s reiterated end completes what can be seen as different films within the main body of the film itself. And they function

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like every duality in Melancholia: oppositional, dissimilar, yet n ­ on-­dialectical. The first is captured in an extreme long shot from a celestial and digitally rendered point of view during the prologue. After moving through their interstellar “death dance” to Wagner’s prelude to Tristan and Isolde, the only non-diegetic source of music in the film, Earth slams into the much larger Melancholia. A fiery flash registers the moment of impact and violent micro-explosions and glacial clouds of debris display the force of what Peter Szendy calls the planets’ “embrace or grasp until death, their lethal and cosmic kiss” (2015, 49). Melancholia continues to engulf its victim as the sequence fades to black and the film subsequently transitions back in time to the terrestrial narrative preceding the already announced end of everything. Viewers are aware what occurs later in the film: Earth and its inhabitants will be incinerated and incorporated into a foreign body named Melancholia; all will be scorched, swallowed up, fully assimilated, and annihilated; every trace and form of life will be reduced to ash in a matter of seconds with nothing left. The second occurrence takes place during the closing moments of the film and from a horizontal, grounded, and Earthly point of view. This follows the sequence in which Justine hurriedly constructs a “magic cave” for her frightened nephew, Leo (Cameron Spurr), who has begun to fathom that what is happening, or what is about to happen, may really be the end as unfathomable as it may be. Resembling the frame of a miniature tepee without a barrier or wall, the “magic cave” simultaneously encloses and exposes its occupants—Justine, Clair, and Leo— through its skeletal configuration. Each character seated within the structure processes the turn of events differently, each with a distinctive worldview that will be obliterated along with the world viewed: Justine, resignation and acceptance; Claire, anguish and fear; and Leo, belief in the protective powers of his aunt’s “magic cave.” Von Trier transitions from a series of extreme close-ups of the three to the film’s final extreme long shot of Melancholia overtaking the horizon and dwarfing the “magic cave” and its occupants. Wagner’s prelude swells as the planets approach their collision and the demise of those who appear to be the only people left in the world. Isolated from any trace of civilization beyond the estate grounds, Justine, Claire, and Leo seem to be the last of the humans—as if they were the post-apocalyptic survivors of some earlier, albeit non-total, disaster, perhaps those who endured the unthinkable anticipation of the event that is now only seconds away.

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Finally, the two planets collide. Viewers again witness the fiery flash that relayed the impact in the prologue’s last shot. However, this time, this additional, Earthly perspective of the disaster that has already occurred as a flash-forward seen from outer space, the second diegetic occasion or reappearance of the first and, as such, only end, is resolutely unlike its antecedent. In the place of the previous objective or scientifically disinterested point of view, spectators confront the all-consuming shockwave of blinding light and fire head-on. One does not bear witness to the diminution or termination of the wave’s force and energy—it consumes everything in the image and beyond. Even the position as a viewer is thrown into question. After blasting through the “magic cave” and its occupants, the fireball appears to devour the place of the camera, and by extension, the very place of cinematic, if not all, testimonial inscription. Fire overwhelms the film frame; the screen goes black, and the music of Tristan and Isolde swiftly fades away. During the initial moments of total darkness, the rumble of the apocalyptic tidal wave remains audible, as if the viewer of the black screen became momentarily submerged or suspended in it, bearing witness to a brief moment of the consumption of everything, even the space and every future place of cinematic spectatorship. As the rumble transitions to silence, at (or after?) the end of Melancholia, viewers confront a soundless black screen for over ten seconds before the emergence of the credits. With this closing gesture, this presentation of absence (no image, no sound), von Trier takes the cinematic depiction of the total apocalypse to its limits by incorporating the viewer into the diegesis, which, following Peterson, suggests a performative enactment of the end of world rather than its representation (411). Viewers, of course, survive the film’s catastrophic finale. And yet, while the appearance of the credits signals the potential of experiencing the film’s end again in the future, Melancholia announces that the complete destruction of a “cinematic world” should, at least in theory, bring about a confrontation with the actual end of the other world, the so-called real world, whose formulation depends on the existence and denigration of those judged to be fictional. For Szendy, the concluding seconds of Melancholia, the imageless frames that push the film beyond its presumed generic containers through the sheer totality of its disaster, invents a new cinema, a medium that features the erasure of inscription. Szendy describes this as a practice that is “no longer really cinema anymore. Or if it is, it’s a cinema of the after-all” (3). The “after-all” (après-tout), in this case, wavers between its figurative

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and literal usages: on one hand, as an adverb, the word speaks to something that transpires despite contrary expectations; on the other hand, and under Szendy’s care, “after-all” describes the temporal-spatiality of any post, which is an encounter with the threshold of that which, after everything, generates some ultimate “after”; or, put differently, what Derrida designates in “No Apocalypse, Not Now” as “the absolute referent” of remainderless nuclear war (402). Through its audiovisual absence, the “cinema of the after-all,” the film that at once fills and renders the void before the credits of Melancholia, illuminates both the nihilistic impulse and structural impossibility of accurately knowing (and not merely “representing”) the end of the world because this event, as an absolute or pure referent, is perpetually symbolic or textual. Indeed, the actual arrival of such a disaster would, by definition, be the end of life and the extinction of all past and future signification; in the end, or in order for there to be such an end in the future, the total apocalypse depicted in von Trier’s film cannot become an unmediated, “real” model outside of the textual discourses that seek to come to terms with it. In short—and notwithstanding the scientific and technological advances that pursue the prediction and avoidance of some doomsday scenario to come—we linger in the dark when it comes to understanding or knowing with any certainty the unthinkable scope of such a disaster, lodged as it were before an endless loop of Melancholia’s final ten seconds. The “absolute inventiveness” of the total apocalypse, says Derrida, “is obviously the possibility of an irreversible destruction, leaving no traces, of the juridico-literary archive and therefore of the basis of literature and criticism” (400). Melancholia repeatedly stages the issues surrounding reference and the archive’s traceless annihilation. As a number of critics have pointed out, many of slow motion images that populate the film’s overture resemble or restage other works of art. For example, the second shot of the film reveals the estate grounds from above, which evoke the geometric garden in Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961). The fourteenth shot features Justine in her wedding dress floating in a stream— at once a gesture toward John Everett Millais’s painting, Ophelia, as well as to the liquid imagery from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). Von Trier appears to reference Tarkovsky’s cinematic archive at least two more times in the prologue: first, in the film’s third shot, which captures the slow burning of Bruegel’s painting, Hunters in the Snow, an image also featured in Solaris; and second, the thirteenth shot, which, set inside the deserted mansion of the film, peers through a window at a lone tree aflame in the

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distance. Beyond comparisons to the burning bush of the Book of Exodus, the composition conjures the color palate and blazes marking two of Tarkovsky’s films about memory and nuclear war—Mirror (1975) and The Sacrifice (1986), respectively. No doubt, there are many other blatant references to what might be called the literary, fictional, or cinematic archive throughout the film. Von Trier’s decision to feature them in Melancholia “hints at their collective vulnerability to erasure,” Peterson says, “as if the film mourns not only the loss of life but also the end of all aesthetic productions that the world’s destruction must necessarily engender” (410). The end of the world, as the irreversible destruction of all life and every imaginable archive, forecloses the possibility of any future reference and act of reading. In this way, the film’s symbolic and highly referential prologue forms a link to the closing moments of the darkened soundless screen at (or after) Melancholia’s end. In spite of their obvious contradictions—the former, overly stylized and dramatic; and the latter, without image and sound, Szendy’s “cinema of the after-all”—collectively imagine and testify to the radical erasure of the archive, which is to say the very possibility of media archivability, or mediation itself. Announcing with its title an interruption or negation of the imperative structure named in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film, Derrida’s reading of the total apocalypse has a host of implications for the representational arts in general and for cinema in particular. On one level, recognizing the absolute referent as something merely fictional, signals that cinema’s immersive audio-visuality and special effects make it exceptionally suited for imagining and (re)producing an end of the world fable, even if the majority of films that do so feature the survival of its protagonists, or a disaster that is not quite total. On another, if the total apocalypse can only be conceived of as that which “exists” to the extent that is only spectacularly fantastic—or better, cinematic—then one runs the risk of “conclud[ing] that it is therefore not real because it remains entirely suspended in its fabulous and literary epoche- ” (Derrida 2007, 402). As an illustration, an image, or other discursive simulation without precedent in the “real world,” the total apocalypse that viewers witness in a film such as Melancholia prompts disbelief; what appears (and by virtue, what is spoken and/or written) always has the potential to generate a certain incredulous attitude from its viewers, since the “fabulous” suspension of this referent is attributable not only to the fact of it not being the thing itself but also to the fact that its appearance, as referent without reference, lacks the proof to gauge its fidelity to the “real thing.”

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But this skeptical approach embodies just a single side of what Derrida calls “a paradox of the referent” (2007, 402). The aforementioned reality of the total apocalyptic fable, the apocalypse as a necessary fiction (“to make it take place or to prevent it from taking place”), the incontestable truth that the complete destruction of the world cannot become a referent for future symbolic processes, reconfigures the believability attending to the absolute referent, as well as its various representations, including those on screen (Derrida 2007, 402). Following Derrida, this means that total apocalypse is both an absolute and “real” referent in the sense that one must accept and believe in it as the “only ultimate and a-symbolic referent (2007, 403, my emphasis).” Insofar as the total apocalypse takes or has its proper place within virtual, fictional, and/or cinematic worlds, then “real life,” or the world that is often assumed to counter those other, fantastical, fictional worlds, must engage the expansive literary field in order to begin to grasp its ruin; or rather, the limits that makes itself possible in the first place. Every “real” effort undertaken to predict, calculate, deter, or provoke such a catastrophe—whether a nuclear war or a direct hit from a massive rogue planet—must take seriously and grant credit to the wholly fictional, performative, invention that remains to come. “Literature,” says Peggy Kamuf, “thus names and figures the threat to the totality that a thinking of life as not-literature, as ‘real life,’ if you will, can only fail to grasp” (2010). The paradox of belief that Derrida traces through “[t]he absolutely real referent” pursues the phantasmatic boundary between what conventionally passes as fiction and fact, virtual and actual. Von Trier’s critical stance toward the certainty—and, as a consequence, the dismissal of belief—associated with scientific knowledge in Melancholia stages this paradox. Take, for instance, a scene from Justine’s botched wedding reception in which she physically closes herself off from the party by retreating to the estate library. The bookcases surrounding her include display panels, and all of them feature books with images of modernist abstract geometric art in the vein of Kazimir Malevich. Upon noticing the images, Justine’s condition transitions from deflated to frenzied as she replaces the books with others in the library that contain pictures of pre-­modern figurative art, including Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath, Karl Fredrik Hill’s Crying Deer, Breughel’s Land of Cockaigne and Hunters in the Snow, and Millais’s Ophelia. For Steven Shaviro and others, Justine’s substitution not only ushers a darker, more chaotic sensibility into what is traditionally expected to be a joyful, orderly event, but also aligns the arranged modernist aesthetic with faith in scientific rationality, as celebrated by Justine’s brother in law, John (Kiefer Sutherland), the wealthy owner of the estate,

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financier of Justine’s wedding, amateur astronomer, and evidently, enthusiast of abstract art (Shaviro 2012 and White and Power 2012). Following Shaviro, the replacement, or perhaps triumph, of images and aesthetic sensibilities during the short library scene symbolizes both Justine’s refusal to adhere to the expectations of the world around her and the fundamental incapacity of “[i]nstrumental rationality” to grapple with “a world that is unbalanced, opaque to rationality, and cruelly indifferent to human concerns” (Shaviro 2012, 29).2 John is clearly proud to be a “man of science”: when Melancholia approaches, he consoles his wife and son, Claire and Leo, with news from the scientific community that its calculations determine a harmless “flyby” rather than a collision with Earth. John, in this way, seems to oppose Justine—through not only his general disposition, wealth, and aesthetic proclivities, but also the credit he grants to supposedly “legitimized” numbers and positivist deductions. While Justine enigmatically announces to Claire at a certain point in the film that she “knows things,” John’s conviction arises from what he presumes to be the hard evidence, if not proof, of measurements and models from authenticated sources. In response to Justine asking if John’s confidence in the path of Melancholia’s trajectory pacifies her, Claire says: “Yes, of course. Well, John studies things. He always has.” Viewers of the film know all along that the science that John so blindly trusts is mistaken, and it is this miscalculation that indicates a diametric contradiction between the assurances of his predictions and Justine’s clairvoyance, between “studying things,” on the one hand, and intuitively “knowing things,” on the other. And yet, rather than exemplifying an unbridgeable gulf between Justine’s intuition and John’s positivism, the scientific error that winds up misreading Melancholia’s movements—a misinterpretation proving that one cannot totally account for the potential of the unforeseen—reveals that the two attitudes are, in fact, intertwined through their shared source of belief.3 The methods or outlooks assumed by Justine and John, “knowing” and “studying,” as different as they may seem, necessitate belief in an event without model, an event worthy of the name, to come, wholly other. In doing so, Melancholia’s questioning of the certainty often undergirding Western scientific thought reemphasizes the fact that quantitative models and raw data sets still necessitate faith, regardless of their backers’ claims (legitimized or not) of objectivity.4 Irreducibly, one is asked to believe that these sorts of calculations provide evidence of the truth. What also remains irreducible is the possibility of the incalculable, forecasts missing the mark, the coming of events that outmaneuver pre-set controls.

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Responding to a world defined—in more ways than one—by “end-­ results” and techno-scientific certainty, the significance of incalculability in Melancholia returns to one of the more harrowing moments in von Trier’s previous film, Antichrist (2009), during which Willem Dafoe’s character stumbles upon a fox that, in the act of disemboweling itself, pauses to utter the words “chaos reigns” at its human observer.5 While chaos does not exactly “reign” in Melancholia as it does in Antichrist, the avowal of the inescapability of chance in the former, the future as the unforeseen and incalculable, and the specter of errancy that haunts every calculation in advance catalyzes the thought of “chaos today,” the potential resistance to programs, and the spaces that permit one to affirm the expanse of the literary archive. All of this returns to the outset of Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” as well as one of the stated aims of this contribution: raising the question of the “real-world” competency of those who work in and on the humanities through the figure of the total apocalypse, and, one might add, the paradox of belief that such a referent produces. Following Derrida’s analysis, the accepted “techno-scientifico-militaro-diplomatic incompetence” of many trained in the humanities today does not preclude their competency in addressing subjects that have actual, catastrophic consequences (2007, 393). On the contrary, and with Melancholia’s end in sight, who else should be considered fit to deal with “real-world” matters such as the escalating possibility of nuclear war, not to mention the pervasiveness of doubt in facts and faith in alarming, exclusionary, alternatives? Who or what can disrupt the phantasm of sovereignty subtending the management and authorization of systems of power? In and at the end, if fiction is the only way to think the threat to everyone and everything living on the planet—if it is, without question, fiction that allows us to approach the unthinkable, the traceless annihilation of the archive—what happens to the division that not only appears to separate the sciences from the humanities, but also “real life” from practices such as the cinema?

Notes 1. For a thorough discussion of the allegorical and literal stakes of the film, see Peterson (2013) and Elsaesser (2016). 2. The scene is also consistent with von Trier’s expressed desire in his director’s statement (2011) “to dive headlong into the abyss of German romanticism. Wagner in spades.” Shaviro (2012) sees this as the film’s general rejection of modernism.

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3. I am here using the term “source” as it relates to act of believing that Derrida (1998) argues is intrinsic to scientific knowledge and religion. For a meticulous reading of “Faith and Knowledge” and its connection to Derrida’s oeuvre, the history of philosophy, and the teletechnical mediascape, see Naas (2012). 4. On the deployment of numeric assessments as a systematic effort to eliminate belief in post-secondary education, see Kamuf (2007). 5. Shaviro (2012, 29) additionally notes the reverberations with “chaos reigns” from Antichrist as it encapsulates the imagery that Justine chooses to replace John’s display of modernist art.

References Blanchot, Maurice. 1986. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone. Trans. Samuel Weber. In Religion, eds. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, 1–78. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2007. No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives). Trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis. In Psyche: Inventions of the Other I, eds. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, 387–410. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2016. Black Suns and a Bright Planet: Melancholia as Thought Experiment. In Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier, ed. Bonnie Honig and Lori J.  Marso, 305–355. New  York: Oxford University Press. Kamuf, Peggy. 2007. Accounterability. Textual Practice 21 (2): 251–266. ———. 2010. Competent Fictions: On Belief in the Humanities (working paper). Naas, Michael. 2012. Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media. New York: Fordham University Press. Peterson, Christopher. 2013. The Magic Cave of Allegory: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Discourse 35 (3): 400–422. Shaviro, Steven. 2012. Melancholia, or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime. Sequence 1(1): 1–58.http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/sequence/files/2012/12/MELANCHOLIAor-The-Romantic-Anti-Sublime-SEQUENCE-1.1-2012-Steven-Shaviro.pdf. Accessed 27 Feb 2019. Szendy, Peter. 2015. Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World. Trans. Will Bishop. New York: Fordham University Press. Von Trier, Lars. 2011. Director’s Statement. http://www.melancholiathemovie. com/#_directorsstatement. Accessed 20 July 2019. White, Rob, and Nina Power. 2012. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia: A Discussion. Film Quarterly. https://filmquarterly.org/2012/01/10/lars-von-triers-melancholia-a-discussion/. Accessed 27 Feb 2019.

CHAPTER 9

Would It Be Bad If the Human Race Ceased to Exist? Melancholia and the Import of Human Existence Hans Pedersen

Abstract  In this chapter I develop an interpretation of von Trier’s Melancholia as making an argument that it would be impossible to consider the elimination of the human race as something bad. After reconstructing the argument in the film as I see it, I proceed to consider whether a counter-argument can be given to provide some non-anthropocentric reasons for objecting to the end of the human race. Using the thought of Hegel and Merleau-Ponty, I show that human beings could be seen as an integral part of the development of the larger organism insofar as we contribute to the conceptual self-consciousness of the world or the less rationalistic self-perception and articulation of the world. Keywords  Melancholia • Hegel • Merleau-Ponty • Anti-natalism • Lars von Trier

H. Pedersen (*) Department of Philosophy, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Haro, W. H. Koch (eds.), The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24918-2_9

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Synopsis and Interpretation of the Film Melancholia chronicles the period leading up to the destruction of Earth by the rogue planet, Melancholia, which is on a collision course with it. Unlike more mainstream apocalyptic movies that revel in scenes of large-­ scale destruction and general panic among the populace, Melancholia focuses primarily on the attitudes of two sisters, Justine and Claire (and sundry members of their family), in the lead-up to the end of the world. The first half of the film details Justine’s wedding, which takes place at some sort of high-end mansion/resort owned by Claire and her husband, John. This part starts in a way that makes it seem like it might be a somewhat normal romantic comedy, complete with silly wedding day mishaps and eccentric relatives perpetually on the verge of spoiling the party. However, it soon becomes clear that Justine is deeply unhappy with the social rituals she is being forced to endure and her general mode of existence as film assumes a much darker tone. The second half of the film picks up after a jump ahead in time. Justine’s marriage has failed, and she returns to Claire’s mansion/resort in a depressive state, so deep, that she cannot get out of bed or bathe herself. At this point, people are becoming concerned that Melancholia seems to be on a path to collide with Earth. Claire becomes increasingly worried about this possibility, despite her husband’s best attempts to assuage her worries with (pseudo?) scientific explanations of why everything will be fine. Justine, on the other hand, emerges from her dysfunctional state as it becomes increasingly clear that Melancholia actually is going to hit the Earth. The film ends with Justine, Claire, and Claire’s son huddled together on a golf course as they disappear in the blinding light of the impact of the Earth/ Melancholia collision. There has not been much scholarly work published on Melancholia, but there are a number of fairly thoughtful movie reviews and lengthy blog posts dedicated to working out an interpretation of the film. The film is rich enough that it has inspired quite an array of diverse, yet plausible interpretations, though perhaps the most obvious one seems to be to see the film as an expression of what it is like to experience melancholia or deep, persistent depression.1 Von Trier himself has been open about his experience with depression (Heath 2011). So, it is easy to see Justine as a surrogate for the director here. She has very limited patience and energy for normal social niceties, at times cannot bring herself to get out of bed,

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and is indifferent to (if not a little giddy about) the prospect of the world ending. The above interpretation makes a good deal of sense and might very well align with the director’s intention, but I was struck by something different after first seeing the film. Von Trier portrays the end of the world in such an aesthetically pleasing way—a growing surge of light accompanied by selections from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde—that I found myself leaving the theater confronted by the question of whether it is possible to make the case that the extinction of the human race would be bad in some objective sense. Setting aside the destruction of the actual planet and other species on it, is it possible to argue that it would be bad if humanity were destroyed in an instant as shown here? Of course, from our perspective, we would see our destruction as bad, but is there a non-anthropocentric reason to object to our extinction? Von Trier provides something of an argument to the contrary here, suggesting that the destruction of the human race is at worst neutral or perhaps even a good thing. In fact, it seems likely that this may have well been on his mind when making the movie. In a 2011 interview shortly after the release of Melancholia, he says the following: Is that what you think we all are—animals squabbling on our way to the slaughterhouse? “Yes. I am afraid so. There’s a lot more to life than that, but that is part of the truth.” He talks about Proust’s veneration of great works of art and church windows. “That gives me some joy, but I still think life is a terribly bad idea.” He says that if God created life—“which I sincerely doubt”—he didn’t think it through. “I think you should have a say when you’re born— ‘Is this really something you want to do?’” And if you could go back, how would you answer? “If I had no children, I would have said no. If I could just, with no hurt for anybody, not have been here, I would not have been here.” Because it would have been less painful for you? “Yes.” (Heath 2011)

While this exchange is not specifically about Melancholia and is more concerned with his general views on life, it seems to imply that he would agree with the claim that I am imputing to the film here—the end of human existence would not be a bad thing. When thinking about how to possibly refute such a claim, we might imagine an individual who wonders about the importance of their e­ xistence

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and concludes that their death would be at worst neutral. A standard response would be to show them how their life has impacted others and make the case that those around them would indeed be worse off without them (the It’s a Wonderful Life approach). There is what would otherwise be an odd exchange between Justine and Claire toward the end of the film that makes it clear von Trier does not think this approach can work when considering the human race as a whole. One might think that if there were other intelligent forms of life close enough to be observing us, they might miss our presence in the universe. However, Justine tells Claire with a startling amount of conviction that we are alone in the universe. There is no intelligent alien species out there that would mourn or even notice our disappearance. The first half of the film also makes the case that the destruction of what we take to be the pinnacle of human civilization is not worth mourning. While it is never revealed where exactly the film takes place, the estate of Claire and John and Justine’s wedding reception seem to serve as a representation of bourgeois ideals in late-period Western capitalism. We have a large country mansion with impeccable landscaping, an attached golf course and horse stables, and uniformed servants. The guests at the reception are well dressed, have lucrative, respectable careers, and engage in light, “witty” banter. Von Trier is quick to show the shallowness and pettiness of all this. There are hushed spats between family members kept out of sight of the attendees; there is a crass reminder from Justine’s boss about work she needs to finish on an advertising campaign; there is the acerbic speech from Justine’s mother denigrating the ideal of marriage as such. In essence, I take von Trier to be asking, “If this is the best we can do, are we really justified in getting upset when this civilization is destroyed?” We might try to establish a stronger non-anthropocentric argument for lamenting the destruction of our species by turning to hedonism. Going as far back as the Ancient Greeks, some philosophers have proposed that we consider the pleasure and pain produced to be an objective, non-­ anthropocentric standard for judging an action or event to be good or bad. If an action produced more pain than alternative courses of action, whether that pain is experienced by humans or any other sentient being, it could be considered bad. When considering the extinction of the human race, it might be argued that that would be bad because it would result in a great deal of pain right at the moment of destruction and would eliminate the possibility of any pleasurable experience by human beings going

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forward. The way that von Trier portrays our existence and our destruction, though, also seems to undermine this argument. The actual end of the world caused by the collision with Melancholia is beautiful and apparently painless, other than the psychological pain of the anticipation of the event experienced by Claire. And as discussed above, von Trier is quite pessimistic about the pleasure derived from our current mode of existence. He would seem to agree with some pessimistic philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer, who argue that when looked at on balance, human existence involves more painful experience than pleasurable.2 If that is right, it is hard to make the case that the destruction of the human race would be bad on hedonistic grounds.

Responding to the Argument for Pessimism in Melancholia In order to respond to the argument put forward in Melancholia as I see it, I want to turn to the consideration of this same issue of finding a non-­ anthropocentric, non-hedonistic conception of value in environmental ethics. Obviously, many debates in environmental philosophy hinge on whether or not the natural environment and beings within it can be said to have some value apart from being instrumentally valuable to human beings. Paul Taylor, in his “The Ethics of Respect for Nature,” introduces the idea of biocentrism to explain how an entity can have non-­ anthropocentric value (Taylor 1981). Here Taylor claims that, “We can think of the good of an individual nonhuman organism as consisting in the full development of its biological powers” (Taylor 1981, 199). As Taylor points out, “the concept of a being’s good is not coextensive with sentience or the capacity for feeling pain” (Taylor 1981, 200). We can still talk about a tree (to use his example) reaching its full development or failing to do so without having to say anything about the tree’s sentience or lack thereof. It is not immediately clear how to apply Taylor’s ideas to the problem posed by Melancholia. There is the simpler possibility of claiming that just like it is bad when a non-human species is eliminated and not given the chance to reach the “full development of its biological powers,” it would be bad if the human species were wiped out and deprived of its chance at development. That might very well be the safer, more plausible path to take, but I want to push for a riskier application of Taylor’s ideas. I would

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propose that we think of the world as a whole as an organism and see the human species as an integral part of the full development of the biological powers of this larger organism. This idea might sound outlandish on the face of it, but there are some approaches to environmental philosophy and environmental science that seem committed to such an idea, and I would suggest, the idea can be found in some of the main Continental philosophers. We can begin with the first part of that claim—the idea that the world can be seen as an organic whole. We find this idea in the work of some prominent figures in the history of environmental philosophy, perhaps most explicitly in that of Arne Naess. Naess puts forward the idea that we should see the Earth as one interconnected “Self,” and that self-realization on the personal, human level amounts to reconnecting with and developing respect for the other forms of life present on the planet (Naess 1986).3 From a more scientific perspective, James Lovelock has articulated and defended what has been called the “Gaia Hypothesis,” the idea that the Earth as a whole is a unitary living organism (Lovelock 2016). Without getting too far into the details here, Lovelock begins with the idea that the defining characteristic of life is the ability to reduce entropy, that is, work against the tendency for there to be increasingly less usable energy in a system (Lovelock 2016, viii). From that basis, he argues that the Earth as a whole should be seen as a living organism, since all of the ecological systems on the planet function together to increase the amount of usable energy available. In his words, the “entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and power well beyond those of its constituent parts” (Lovelock 2016, 9). Now, it seems that when environmental philosophers and scientists propose that we think of the world as one organic whole, the implication is that the recognition that humans are just one facet of this whole among many, many others should lead us to decrease or eliminate the emphasis we place on human concerns and human existence. In essence, the environmental philosophers and scientists mentioned here would endorse the first part of the claim that I am pushing, but would likely reject the second part—the idea that humans are somehow a crucial part of the full development of the whole. If this is right, then they would presumably say to the question posed by Melancholia that it is no greater tragedy for the human species to be eliminated than for any other species to go extinct.4

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However, in the work of several prominent philosophers in the Continental tradition, we find the idea that humans are a part of a much larger whole coupled with the idea that humans, or least beings who share some of the key aspects of human existence, are necessary for the world, this larger whole, to reach a state of full development. In what follows, I will not make the case for favoring one of these views over the other, but will instead lay out in very general terms what the integral role for humans would be from each of these viewpoints. We begin with the Hegelian view that existence as such is to be thought of as the unfolding of Geist, spirit or mind. The world as a whole reaches its full state of development when it has achieved self-consciousness. Humans are that part of the world through which it achieves self-­ consciousness. In Hegel’s words, “[Spirit] must be an object to itself, but just as immediately a sublated object, reflected into itself. It is for itself only for us, as its spiritual content is generated by itself” (Hegel 1977, 14). Spirit is able to be completely reflected to itself through us since we are that aspect of existence capable of a higher-level, conceptual understanding of the world around us, as Hegel adds, “Spirit that, so developed, knows itself as Spirit, is Science; Science is its actuality” (Hegel 1977, 14). Hegel, as we will discuss in the final section of the chapter, means science in the very broad sense of any conceptual knowledge so that as we increase our conceptual understanding of the world, we are bringing the world closer to a state of full self-consciousness, since we are part of the whole organism that is the world. In his work, The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram uses Merleau-­ Ponty’s work to put a different spin on this idea (Abram 1997). For Merleau-Ponty, the focus is on the sensuous, enactive nature of perception and knowledge, rather than the more philosophically traditional focus on the conceptual that we find in Hegel. In particular, Abram works to further develop Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh,” as laid out in the latter’s The Visible and the Invisible. There, Merleau-Ponty describes the world, everything that is, as flesh. As humans, we too are flesh, and our sensuous interaction with the world around us is the reciprocal interaction of the flesh of existence. He says, “that means that my body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is a perceived), and moreover that this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 248). On Abram’s interpretation, this means that, “We might as well say that we are organs

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of this world, flesh of its flesh, and that the world is perceiving itself through us” (Abram 1997, 68). Abram does not stop at the level of perceptual sense experience of the world around us. He again uses Merleau-Ponty’s work to make the case that language is rooted in our bodily interaction with the world, implying that when we use language, we are the instrument through which the world articulates itself. As Abram says, “it is not human language that is primary, but rather the sensuous, perceptual life-world, whose wild, participatory logic ramifies and elaborates itself in language” (Abram 1997, 84). Furthermore, “it is no more true that we speak than that the things, and the animate world speak within us” (Abram 1997, 85). So, when we speak, we bring to expression the prelinguistic structure and logic of what is already there implicitly in the natural world. While Abram makes it clear that human speech should be thought of as more or less akin to the “speech” of other animals, I would suggest that it is plausible to maintain that humans are able to give a fuller and more sophisticated articulation of the structure of the world than other animals. So, on either of these accounts, the elimination of the human race would be bad from the non-anthropocentric viewpoint of the world as a whole, not just from the anthropocentric point of view. In either case, the world, conceived of as an organic whole, would fail to reach its fullest degree of development—thought of as conceptual self-consciousness or the less rationalistic self-perception and articulation—if the human species is eliminated. We can pause a bit here and consider what implications my line of thought, as developed up to this point, have for hedonistic arguments in support of the view that it would be no great ill if humans ceased to exist. In his, “On the Sufferings of the World,” Arthur Schopenhauer puts forward the more straightforward hedonistic argument against the continuance of the human species (Schopenhauer 2007). For Schopenhauer, it really does seem to be a simple aggregative process—consider all of the things in life we traditionally think of as pleasurable and see if they in fact outweigh the pains that accompany them or the pain present in other aspects of human existence. He concludes that after doing this calculation, we will find that in fact the pleasures of life are outweighed by the pains, so non-existence is to be preferred to existence. More recently, David Benatar has defended a more sophisticated version of this pessimistic view, which he refers to as anti-natalism (Benatar 1997, 2008).5 Benatar does agree with Schopenhauer that tallying up the

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pleasures and pains experienced in life is likely to lead to the conclusion that pain outweighs pleasure (Benatar 1997, 349–350). However, he goes beyond merely tallying up pains and pleasures that are experienced. He makes the case that there is nothing bad about non-existence, while there is something bad about existence. Existence involves the experience of pleasure, which is good, and the experience of pain, which is bad. Non-­ existence is the total lack of experience of pain or pleasure. In his words: There are benefits both to existing and non-existing. It is good that existers enjoy their pleasures. It is also good that pains are avoided through non-­ existence. However, that is only part of the picture. Because there is nothing bad about never coming into existence, but there is something bad about coming into existence, all things considered non-existence is preferable (Benatar 1997, 348–349).

So, Benatar strengthens the pessimist position by implying that even if there is a chance that the lives of certain individuals might have a preponderance of pleasure, it is still best to opt for non-existence on the whole. The view I have been developing here undercuts the hedonistic pessimist’s argument by providing a different standard for judging the worthwhileness of the existence of a species—its contribution to the development of the earth as a whole. If we ask whether it is good for bees, say, to exist, we do not consider whether the life of any individual bee is likely to have more pleasure than pain; instead, we would usually answer that the continued existence of this species is unambiguously good because of the role bees play in maintaining a healthy ecosystem. Similar things can be said about species further up the scale of cognitive sophistication, and hence more likely to experience pleasure and pain in ways akin to our own (for instance, wolves). So, I would suggest that we take the same approach to the human species and conclude that it is good that the species continues to exist insofar as we too contribute to the development of the organic whole, regardless of whether individual members of the species are likely to lead lives with more pain than pleasure.

Implications for the Meaning of an Individual Life I want to conclude things by considering what the preceding thoughts imply for the meaning that individuals find in their own lives. This is going in a different direction than the main thrust of the chapter, where I have

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tried to be careful to stay focused on the importance of the continued existence of the species as a whole. I wanted to focus more on the individual side of things because I think that what I have developed so far concerning the importance of the species can lend itself to addressing some of the longstanding questions about the meaning of individual existence. In Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that, “we shall find the best good [for a human being] if we first find the function of a human being” (Aristotle 1999, 1097b24–25). He goes on to suggest that it is clear that there are functions associated with human professions (e.g., carpenter or leatherworker) and different parts of the human body (Aristotle 1999, 1097b29–33). However, it is not clear to him that there is some general human function as such. Aristotle’s solution here, something that has never quite sat right with me, is to shift to talking about what sets humans apart from any other form of life, the part of the soul that has reason (Aristotle 1999, 1098a3–4). He seems to think that even if we cannot specify the exact function of humans as such, it is enough to say that it must involve using reason, since that is our one feature not shared by other forms of life. From that point on for Aristotle (and plenty of philosophers following him), it seems that the excellent use of rationality becomes an end in itself (and indeed the highest end) simply because the exercise of reason constitutes the fulfillment of the potential of the individual that is no longer embedded in a larger whole. If I have given some reason to think that the elimination of the human species as a whole would be bad because the world would not be able to reach the full development of its biological powers without us (or beings of similar intellectual characteristics), then this does seem to pick out a function for the human species as such. To live well as a human, then, would be to participate to the greatest extent possible in the process of existence coming to think itself (on the Hegelian view) or perceive and articulate itself (on the Abram/Merleau-Ponty view). This suggestion is, in a way, in line with the traditional philosophical prioritization of rationality in living well, but also differs from the tradition in important ways. For one thing, the sort of rationality required to fulfill our function, as suggested by the Abram/Merleau-Ponty view, need not be the narrow idea of rationality that is associated with conceptual knowledge and logical reasoning. Furthermore, on my account, striving for excellence in the use of reason in order to live well is no longer a largely egoistic pursuit. It is not just because someone as an individual wants to live the best life possible

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for themselves, but rather that the pursuit of rationality contributes to the flourishing of the world as a whole. Now we can consider what living a meaningful life as an individual would look like more concretely. From the Hegelian perspective, I think the German term, Wissenschaft, is helpful. As Hegel says near the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit, “Spirit, manifesting or appearing in consciousness in this element, or what is the same thing, produced in it by consciousness, is Science [Wissenschaft]” (Hegel 1977, 486). Taking Wissenschaft literally, Hegel is saying that it is in the production of knowledge that Spirit fully manifests itself and becomes self-conscious, as “only Science is its true-knowledge of itself” (Hegel 1977, 488). So, an individual engaged in the serious intellectual work of developing conceptual knowledge of the world and how it has unfolded is contributing to the full manifestation of the world. This might very well be a broader claim than Hegel would want to make, but I would suggest we interpret this rather inclusively to mean that being seriously engaged in the natural sciences, the human sciences, or even philosophy (if one considers that a separate category) are all ways in which an individual can contribute to the fulfillment of the function of the species in the context of the organic whole of existence. It is a little bit harder to see what the recommendation would be for the individual from the Abram/Merleau-Ponty point of view. One of the constant themes woven through Abram’s work is that our interaction with the natural world is now either absent altogether or mediated by our technology so that we rarely have that pure, reciprocal bodily interaction with the natural world that he sees as the basis for the possibility of the world perceiving and articulating itself in an authentic manner. So, for Abram, there is the exhortation to reestablish an immediate bodily connection with the natural world to once again become attuned to its rhythms and nuances. As discussed above, though, it is not merely the bare perception of the world that makes the human species special from this point of view. It is rather our ability to pick up on the latent articulation of the world in our use of language. Abram extols the virtues of the songs and poems of “less developed” cultures that he thinks more closely stick to the features of the natural world. However, he is not advocating for a “going back” to a “less sophisticated” mode of verbal expression. In his words: Only if we can renew that reciprocity—grounding our newfound capacity for literate abstraction in those older, oral forms of experience—only then

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will the abstract intellect find its real value. It is surely not a matter of ‘going back,’ but rather of coming full circle, uniting our capacity for cool reason with those more sensorial and mimetic ways of knowing (Abram 1997, 270).

Now I might attempt to return full circle to try to concretize what Abram is going for here using an example from the film. In the second half of Melancholia, there is a striking scene where Justine slips out of the house at night and, while naked, lies on a river bank so that she is directly looking up at the approaching planet, which is increasingly filling the sky. There is obviously an explicit sensuality to this scene—Justine seems to be aiming for the most direct, bodily experience possible of the oncoming collision, shedding any mediating element between herself and the natural world. This is contrasted with John’s observations of Melancholia that are mediated by his telescope and his homemade device meant to determine whether the planet is getting closer or moving away. His perceptual experience is ultimately shown to be shallow and false, while Justine is able to abide in the truth of what is happening and is really the only character in the film who is able to do so. I would suggest that it is her engaged, bodily perception of the unfolding of the impending collision that truly fulfills the aim of the flesh of the world perceiving itself. Her body, directly in contact with the grass and rocks of the river bank, serves as the canvas for the light cast from the oncoming planet; there is no technological device distorting her experience or distancing her from it. This is grasping the truth of the impending collision in a profoundly physical, bodily way. Abram maintains that our attempts to articulate the world through language must be grounded in this sort of bodily experience. While Justine does not provide this sort of linguistic articulation of the truth that she has grasped in the film, I would still suggest that her bodily grasp of this truth is the sort of thing that Abram is envisioning as the proper basis of such an articulation. So, we have, then, two rough sketches of what it would look like to live a meaningful life as an individual on this view: the Hegelian production of conceptual knowledge of the world and the Abramian embrace of that pure, unmediated experience of the natural world and its subsequent articulation. I realize that much of what I have put forward is quite speculative and would need a much more robust defense, but I hope to have at least pointed to a possible path that could be taken to counter the pessimistic argument that I see in Melancholia, or indeed, the pessimistic arguments offered by philosophers and conclude that there is a non-anthropocentric

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reason to wish for the continued existence of the human race, a reason that can in turn provide a guideline for meaningful existence on the individual level.

Notes 1. See, for example, A.O. Scott’s review of the film for The New York Times (Scott 2011). 2. More will be said about the hedonistic argument against the importance of the continued existence of the human race later in the paper. 3. See especially section 8 of Naess’s paper. 4. Let me remind the reader again that I am taking a bit of license here and ignoring the fact that the whole planet is destroyed in the film. 5. Benatar initially makes the argument in his “Why It Is Better Never to Have Come into Existence” (1997) and presents the fuller version of this argument in his book, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (2008).

References Abram, David. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books. Aristotle. 1999. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Terence Irwin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Benatar, David. 1997. Why It Is Better Never to Have Come into Existence. American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (3): 345–355. ———. 2008. Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heath, Chris. 2011. Lars Attacks! GQ. https://www.gq.com/story/lars-vontrier-gq-interview-october-2011?currentPage=1. Accessed 8 Jan 2019. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. J.N. Findlay. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lovelock, James. 2016. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Left. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Naess, Arne. 1986. The Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects. Philosophical Inquiry 8 (1/2): 10–31. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2007. On the Sufferings of the World. In Studies in Pessimism, 5–18. Trans. T. Bailey Saunders. New York: Cosimo.

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Scott, A.O. 2011. Bride’s Mind Is on Another Planet. The New  York Times, November 10. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/movies/lars-vontriers-melancholia-review.html. Accessed 8 Jan 2019. Taylor, Paul W. 1981. The Ethics of Respect for Nature. Environmental Ethics 3 (3): 197–218.

CHAPTER 10

It Is There in the Beginning: Melancholia, Time, and Death Jessica S. Elkayam

Abstract  This essay ventures a dialogue between Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun and Lars Von Trier’s film, Melancholia on the grounds that in each, melancholia (or narcissistic depression) is figured through planetary compulsion. Utilizing Kristeva’s singular approach to Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia to read the film, I argue that a particular form of depression characterizes the style of living (and dying) embodied in each of the two sisters who together form the film’s emotional center. Consideration of philosophy and film in dialogue yields a final insight into the phenomenon of melancholia as it relates to human temporality and lived finitude: melancholia demonstrates an extremity of psychic loss, underscoring that death is not merely the end; it is there in the beginning. Keywords  Melancholia • Mourning • Temporality • Death • Depression • Kristeva

J. S. Elkayam (*) Department of Psychology & Philosophy, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2019 J. A. Haro, W. H. Koch (eds.), The Films of Lars von Trier and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24918-2_10

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One provocative mystery of Kristeva’s Black Sun presents to the reader in its opening lines. She addresses “those who are racked by melancholia” but immediately changes voice (1989, 3). Melancholia no longer belongs solely to the analysand whom the analyst strives to cure of their pathology. It has become Kristeva’s own intimate burden. The effort to confront an “abyss of sorrow, an incommunicable grief” issues not only from her diagnostic observations as doctor to patients’ symptomologies but from the testimony of her own experience (1989, 3). Such an unequivocal crossing of the threshold between doctor and patient, observer and pathological observed, is itself mysterious. But the mystery is further compounded by deliberately animate ambiguity,1 making the status of Black Sun as text problematic. And though Kristeva appears to perform the written testimonial she prescribes,2 Black Sun is not a confessional memoir. Neither a strict academic exposition nor a clinical manual for the diagnosis and treatment of melancholia, it exists, rather, at the crossroads of all of these forms, sustained by Kristeva’s profound expertise and ability to witness and record. The same is true of director Lars von Trier’s luminous film, Melancholia (2011). Neither a technical emptying out of all sensual, spectatorial pleasure seeking only to intellectually stimulate, nor a documentary testimonial of his own frequently invoked struggle with melancholia,3 nor again a manual for diagnosis and treatment, but all of these. Where technical expertise and artistry meet an unflinching eye for the intimately if disturbingly personal, emerges a compelling character study of temperamentally complementary sisters coping with the imminent end of the world as the planet Melancholia draws near. No viewer is immune to seduction by these “emotional centers” of the film,4 by their styles of living and dying. Thus what invites conversation between Kristeva and von Trier far exceeds their shared interest in the mere subject of melancholia. Any such conversation, to thrive, must steer clear of a fact indexical approach. It is far more likely to bear fruit when attentive to method. Albert Camus once wrote that methods imply metaphysics, that choices disguised as simply procedural announce the deepest commitments of the thinker who makes them (1991, 11). While I make no claim to unearthing metaphysical commitments here, I do insist key methodological choices alert us to motile but traceable thought-patterns that tend most to repeat across disparate contexts when the phenomenon under consideration is in fact, that is, in life, the same. Given the self-implication articulated through technical expertise in the account of melancholia Kristeva and von Trier offer, it is not surprising that the warp and weft of authorial proximity and

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distance is strikingly similar.5 Yet in light of the disparity of context and difference in the angle of engagement, such patterns of thought that repeat at the intersection of text and film are bound to issue from phenomenological fidelity to the thing itself. The space of this essay is inadequate to fully engage Kristeva’s Black Sun, attesting to a style and system extensively prefigured. It is also insufficient to exhaust von Trier’s filmography or his stages of directorial development, paying homage in each of these to the “seasoning” that melancholia provides.6 Instead, I propose to highlight a central moment of methodological intersection disclosing a thought-pattern whose repetition across context drives at the heart of melancholia. Although at the cost of elaborating the details of each system, this intersectional approach opens onto a deeper and indeed dialogical understanding of the phenomenon as would otherwise be foreclosed by appeal to text or film alone.

Of Cosmic Origins: Melancholia and the Planetary The central moment of methodological intersection involves the choice to bring melancholia to image as a planet. For von Trier, Melancholia is the “liquescent heavenly body”7 that comes to collide with the Earth, initiating the end of the world for human and all earthly life. The first appearance of Melancholia in the proper narrative of the film is punctuated by a rupture in the comic levity of the opening post-­Overture sequence, in which newlywed bride (Kirsten Dunst) and groom (Alexander Skarsgård) are introduced in the back of a ridiculously long limousine shot from above as it attempts and fails to negotiate a turn up a long drive. Inside the limo shots are handheld and almost impossibly close, suggesting genuine intimacy both between bride and groom and between spectator and celebrity—as bride and groom “star” in their wedding day and Dunst is immediately recognizable in her dimpled smile and blonde, bridal perfection. Our narrative location of Dunst/Justine as the ornamental center of every frame is encouraged by Von Trier, who places her between her handsome new husband (Skarsgård) and the unseen male driver with whom Michael engages in a predictable patriarchal dance around the ability to drive. When Justine takes the wheel, gently mocking both men and flirtatiously inquiring, “How do I put it in…?” (drive, presumably), she initiates a minor accident for which she apologizes with an impish kiss through the driver’s side window.

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This is the first of many apologies to follow, which grow earnest as the scene shifts abruptly to night. The frame darkens. The soundscape fills with footsteps crunching gravel as the newlywed couple climb the drive toward what looks to be a magisterially lit castle where they are awaited by Justine’s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). We do not know how much time has elapsed. Instead Von Trier highlights the exchange between the starkly juxtaposed sisters—one blonde, the other brunette; one the ivory bride, voluminous in ruffled tulle ball gown, the other the gray matron, lean, austere, and almost feathered, like an ugly duckling. There is nothing to suggest their relation but the aggravation and intimacy between them as Claire almost pleads with Justine, “You’re sure you want this…?” She assumed her mercurial sister would no longer want her lavish wedding party. Justine retorts, “Of course.” After a quick glance at the wedding schedule (placing them halfway through and two hours late) they turn to head inside. Von Trier frustrates this grasp at context; the camera follows the wedding party, then abruptly stops. Justine is shot in profile, gazing up. Cut to close up, the frame just wide enough to also capture Claire’s exasperated expression as Justine inquires, “What star is that?” The handheld bounces up, holding on the night sky and a loose constellation of stars. Another patriarchal dance, this time between husbands: “John, you’re a bit of an expert, aren’t you?” Michael asks, “I wouldn’t say that,” John replies. Claire immediately quips, “Oh yes, you would,” green-lighting a conversation that teaches us Justine has eyes to see what we cannot: the red star, Antares, in the Scorpio constellation. Although seemingly insignificant since Justine’s first sighting is not of the planet Melancholia, this moment catalyzes the domino effect distinctive of tragedy—prophesied at narrative inception and subsequently unfolding before the eyes of the audience, even as the characters do not have full understanding of what is transpiring. Having already been introduced to the inevitable end of the world in the Overture that opens the film, soundtracked by Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, we understand that each of the characters—captured in almost-stills suggestive of painting and inviting speculative contemplation in ways the moving image does not8— has a role to play in unfolding the prophecy. Justine’s pause to glance at the sky triggers our memory of the collision of Melancholia and Earth, inviting us to place her (back) in the image of bride as Ophelia, the agent of tragic climax.

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Given the conventions of tragedy and of cinematic narrative, it comes as little surprise that as soon as Justine experiences planetary pull, we become aware her impulsiveness is not simply charming, but possibly pathological. Just when decorum dictates she enter her wedding reception, Justine insists on visiting Abraham—also in the Overture, for whom the finitude of space reflects the closed horizon of an already finished time bound to re-bound on troubled origins both of life and of narrative. Thus it is Abraham who halts at the perimeter of the property, refusing to cross the bridge to the world beyond and causing Justine to notice the absence of Antares from the sky. What she does not yet know but we have begun to suspect: the red star is blocked by Melancholia’s approach. This moment punctuates not only the narrative shift from Justine to Claire, but insinuates that the total collapse of the wedding (and of the bride) was compelled by the planet. Hence this first seemingly minor transgression—Justine’s stopping at the threshold of the expected to follow an impulse—proves to be the first unraveling of one of many fateful threads… * * * For Kristeva, celestial body as metaphor for melancholia appears in the opening pages of Black Sun: Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation? (1989, 3)

Before naming the author of this “dazzling metaphor,”9 Kristeva invokes the black sun to image an excessive celestial body—beyond, but to which the human is nonetheless related, superlatively powerful, and yet bound to compel. Certainly von Trier expresses this compulsive relation between celestial and human, M/melancholia and melancholic, in the film, and compulsion of human life by the planetary is not otherwise without precedent. Analogically M/melancholia (and accordingly, Kristeva/Nerval’s black sun) controls the enigmatic tides of depressive moods just as the moon controls those of the sea and women’s menstrual cycles. The analogy proves especially fruitful considering the compulsion in play is no ­cause-­effect determinism, but rather the tuning of a “semiotic” rhythm, a

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pulse as much bodily as expressed through the mysterious phenomenon of mood. Indeed if the aim is to unearth the “logic” that makes the metaphor resonate, Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic requires further attention. For while the cinematic artform shares economy of thought with metaphor, and von Trier’s depiction of the planet Melancholia fires on several cylinders—literal, figurative, and potentially allegorical—a closer look at the semiotic gets at the heart of not only what is happening across multiple contexts, but how and why.

Exploring the Semiotic: Entry into Psychic Life and Preconditions for Melancholia Notoriously perplexing and little articulated in Black Sun, conceptual grasp of the semiotic requires attending to the broader context of signification for the subject. As Nöelle McAfee makes mercifully clear,10 there is, for Kristeva, no language without the subject who speaks it, and no subject without language. Given the mutual determination of subjectivity and language, language plays a pivotal role in the development of the subject and analysis of anything signified by language reveals the subject in more ways than one. As a mode of signification, the semiotic (le sémiotique) is best distinguished by contrast to its complement, the symbolic. The symbolic expresses clear and orderly meaning—muscular, systematic, and lawfully articulate—while the semiotic bespeaks evocation of feeling or discharge of drive(s), the extra-verbal way in which bodily energy and affects enter into and even exceed language (McAfee 2004, 15, 17). Though distinct, Kristeva thinks the modes as intertwined. Thus living language—whether verbal or literary—is more than the sum of its symbolic and semiotic parts; it is “neither pure logic nor pure music” (McAfee 2004, 17), but their intertwining to varying degrees as the semiotic resounds by discharge into the symbolic and the speaking being’s own living energy infuses meaning into language. Such intertwining is accomplished for signification in subjective development—that is, the modes act as markers, separated from one another but bridged by, following Husserl and Lacan, Kristeva’s thetic phase. The infant is born into the semiotic chora, wherein subject and object are not yet distinct, and formal language is not yet in play. Borrowing the

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­ esignation from Plato’s Timaeus, Kristeva deploys chora as that primord dial space in which the cosmos begins to generate. Perhaps most intriguing, she invokes this macrocosmic image to explain the dynamics at the microcosmic level of human origins. Hence the semiotic chora is, for each subject, each speaking being, that space of immersion and plenitude anterior to the development of the borders that separate self from other, that space in which the subject begins to generate. Kristeva pushes back against chora as passive void, opting for rhythm and articulation preceding language.11 Clarifying Kristeva’s meaning in developmental terms, McAfee explains: In this early psychic space, the infant experiences a wealth of drives…that could be extremely disorienting and destructive were it not for the infant’s relation with [the] mother’s body…[which] provides an orientation for [these] drives. Kristeva often uses the term chora in conjunction with the term semiotic: her phrase “the semiotic chora” reminds the reader …the chora is the space in which the meaning…produced is semiotic: the echolalias, glossolalias, rhythms, and intonations of an infant who does not yet know how to use language to refer to objects, or of a psychotic who has lost the ability to use language in a properly meaningful way (2004, 19, emphasis mine).

And while rhythmic movement in the chora is felt as a pulse inscribed psychically and pre-linguistically as affect, there is no vantage from which one may say, “I am here,” and, “an other there.” For thesis to occur, for a ray to be posited that first opens the space of difference, there must be a rupture in the primordial oneness of mother and child—a thetic break. The thetic break then marks the threshold, Kristeva argues, between the two heterogeneous realms of the semiotic and the symbolic, inaugurating the subject’s entry into the symbolic—into language and law, syntax and social order. As a consequence, the borderless infant who primarily identified with the mother, experiences its first sense of “self” through loss, abjecting the mother’s body to erect borders that produce both a nostalgic longing for (re-)union and a profound anxiety at their possible dissolution/penetration. But was the semiotic not introduced to illuminate the tuning of mood that characterizes the compulsive relation between celestial and human bodies? Of what import is the semiotic for understanding the logic of melancholia? The answer is twofold.

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First, development—from semiotic chora through thetic break into the symbolic—is the cost of entry into psychic life. Such a development renders each speaking being the sufferer of a loss which, according to Freud, is either mourned and properly integrated into the ego structure, or not (1964, 247–248). In either case, original loss is the precondition for development and for love, for the subject’s entry into a life made meaningful. For Kristeva, without loss and consequent lack, there is no need to develop signs and symbols. To fill the void, to make it meaningful, the speaking being deploys the symbol—not as an equivalence to the affective excitation that occasioned it, but as a gesture of mastery and understanding.12 That said, the condition of the speaking being is, at the point where meaning originates and development springs to life, inherently melancholic. Hence we do not seek the meaning of despair, Kristeva insists, but rather recognize that there is meaning only in despair (Kristeva 1989, 5–6). “Without a bent for melancholia, there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play” (1989, 4). Second, of the several valences of melancholia,13 Kristeva is most interested in a form of depression called “narcissistic,” involving a loss suffered while still in the semiotic chora. Before the child has need of language to express desire—crossing the thetic threshold into the symbolic and discharging semiotic impulses, affects, and drives through meaningful communication—the mother is lost, to death, trauma, or another form of maternal unavailability (like depression). A profound implication of this loss, which may be provisionally recovered from only to re-emerge as the onset of a depression seemingly without precedent,14 is that separation from the mother—recognizing her as other, as object—never fully takes place. Such a refusal of separation results in psychotic pathology, and, given the link between Kristeva’s semiotic chora and Lacan’s concept of the Real, amounts to being “close to a living death” (Lechte 1990, 33). If non-pathological development accomplishes separation and identification with the “father in individual prehistory” as the basis for amorous idealization and successful narcissistic structure, then it does so precisely because it integrates foundational loss and establishes the alterity that love requires. Thus, on the one hand: love, fueled by symbolic idealization; on the other: melancholia, tending to union with Lacan’s Real and with Kristeva’s mother and death.15 There the semiotic chora becomes a site of origination inspiring both longing and dread, but exceeds even this. For the

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­ elancholic, the semiotic chora is that space wherein loss occurs, giving m specific shape to the features of depression. Hence this specificity of loss distinguishes narcissistic depression from the objectal form characterized by classical psychoanalytic theory. The latter is named in homage to the lost object toward which the unsuccessful mourner (the depressive) feels a hidden hostility. This disguised aggression, “reveals the ambivalence on the part of the mourner with respect to the object of his mourning” (Kristeva 1989, 10). I love them, the depressive says. So as not to lose them, I install them in myself. I take the other into myself, incorporate them, and they become my “necessary and tyrannical judge.”16 However, because secretly I hate them, I also hate this other, this bad ego I have installed in myself: I am bad, worthless, (so) I am destroying myself. Responding to this covert operation, analysis aims to manifest the fact that self-hatred surfacing in objectal depression is actually other-directed hatred—made all the more sticky by its likelihood to bear along with it an unsuspecting sexual desire (Kristeva 1989, 11). In summary, recalling the twofold answer to the question of its import, the semiotic was shown to be: (1) when paired with chora, the key to understanding the human condition as primordially melancholic; and (2) the concept that enables distinction between objectal and narcissistic depression, the latter of which Kristeva identifies with melancholia. Von Trier’s Melancholia, while not explicitly engaged with Kristeva, nevertheless fires on both of these cylinders, embodying the distinction in and through the figures of the two sisters, and uniting them through lucidity into the melancholic—that is, death-bound—quality of the human condition.

To the Thing Itself: Melancholia, Time, and Death That the sisters each embody a form of depression is first suggested by Claire’s repetition of the phrase, “I hate you so much, Justine,”—significant both because of what it expresses and when it is expressed. As to what, the hostility bubbling to the surface announces that hidden aggression about which Claire feels guilty, and which no doubt lies at the source of her neurosis. Her fear of that “stupid planet” disguises her ambivalent feelings toward the sister whose behavior is compelled by it. As to when, each incitement of hostility issues from disruption to the symbolic, from Justine’s outright rejection of the rules and of propriety.

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We first hear the phrase in response to Justine’s open disregard for the wedding, and it is repeated in reaction to Justine’s nihilistic rejoinder to Claire’s plan for the end of the world. Claire clearly prefers the saner side of the thetic break, as indicated by the traditional structure of her family, her material and institutional security, and the repeated attestation of her mother. Thus while her depression emerges in contradistinction to John’s rationally instrumental sanity so as to be rejected as a form of nonsense, it is nevertheless treatable—neurotic rather than psychotic—lending Claire a sense of normalcy denied Justine. Finally, while both forms of depression belie the “same impossible mourning for the maternal object,”17 and thus to some degree, loss of her mother must be key to her pathology, all evidence suggests Claire’s hostility is to her sister, for whom she became the mother in the absence of their own. Having twice filled the maternal void by becoming mother, Claire’s ambivalent hostility is directed toward Justine—representative of that semiotic, imaginative state from which Claire has been severed in her choice of the symbolic only to be merged with it/her again at the end of the world in the very space of imagination itself: the magic cave erected by her child and Auntie Steelbreaker. Justine’s depression is first distinguished by its quality of sadness. Narcissistic depression—named for its distinctive primitive wound to self-­ identification—is not, Kristeva argues, correlated to a loved/hated object, but to ultimate lack or congenital deficiency, to sorrow as itself the only object. Thus it is Justine who is “ill,” Justine who cannot function—walk, stand on her feet, taste her food—Justine for whom sadness is all. Of course the scene where she pursues her mother, childishly implores her for comfort, and is refused, is telling here. Indeed the only screen time between daughter and mother alone is reserved for Justine. Even John’s effort to retrieve “mom” from her bath for the cutting of the cake is met by a response that speaks volumes. Gaby—played by the inimitable, characteristically cold Charlotte Rampling—responds, “When Justine took her first crap from her body, I wasn’t there. When she had her first sexual intercourse, I wasn’t there. So give me a break, please, with all your fucking rituals.” Finally, Justine’s descent into despair—marked by her abrupt exits from and increasingly detached returns to the wedding reception—is initiated by Gaby’s reluctant speech. Responding to her ex-husband referring to her as “a bit domineering at times,” Gaby pushes out her chair and raises herself up to her full height. Having dispensed with Justine’s father, she

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begins, “Yes. I wasn’t at the church.” Disparaging institutions from her dispassionate height, “I don’t believe in marriage. Claire, who I’ve always taken for a sensible girl, you’ve arranged a spectacular party. Till death do us part. Forever and ever, Justine and Michael. I just have one thing to say.” The camera lands decisively on the bride and groom: “Enjoy it while it lasts.” As it turns out, this is not so much pronouncement as prophecy. The marriage will only last the space of this single evening. Further dealing death, she turns to John, her real adversary given the fact that her ex-­ husband is more spoon-stealing clown than formidable enemy, “I myself hate marriages.” John attempts to intervene, but Gaby concludes, “Especially when they involve some of my closest family members.” Though Claire whispers, “Why did you even bother coming?” and though she is clearly pained, her close up reveals a porcelain composure. But the subsequent close up of Justine is anguished. Justine closes her eyes, retreating to the internal dreamscape, languishing. It is as though the death blow Gaby delivers here conditionally prefigures Melancholia’s, reopening Justine’s narcissistic wound and exacerbating Claire’s neurosis. But of all the evidence suggesting Justine fits the Kristevan diagnosis of narcissistic melancholic, none is more compelling than this: because the narcissistic wound suffered occurs before the other is recognized as such, that is, becomes an object experienced as lost (inciting the aggressive ambivalence described above), the loss is anterior to objectivity. The melancholic mourns the Thing, that “center of attraction and repulsion” not yet object of desire (Kristeva 1989, 13). Kristeva writes: Of this, Nerval provides a dazzling metaphor that suggests an insistence without presence, a light without representation: The Thing is an imagined sun, bright and black at the same time. ‘It is a well known fact that one never sees the sun in a dream, although one is often aware of some far brighter light’. (1989, 13)

This insight enables us to draw an important conclusion: the methodological intersection between Kristeva and von Trier, the planetary compulsion of Part I, is no mere coincidental pairing of M/melancholia and melancholic. The metaphor resonates precisely because the melancholic is a narcissistic depressive who has suffered the loss of the pre-­objective Thing.

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As with other structures temporally preceding subjective entry into the symbolic and therefore resisting articulation, Kristeva here appeals to Heidegger—to the Thing (das Ding).18 She does so, she insists, to supplement Freud—with a temporal referent that points back to the pre-­symbolic past (1989, 263), to that elusive “real that does not lend itself to signification” (1989, 13). Recalling that love is fueled by symbolic idealization while melancholia tends to union with Lacan’s Real and Kristeva’s mother and death (Part II), it is notable that Thinghood involves: (1) a pointing back to the pre-symbolic past as elusive “real” and (2) a discovery in the past of the “real” as the affectively inscribed figure of death itself. In a corollary to Black Sun Kristeva expands: The metaphor of the ‘black Sun’ for melancholy admirably evokes the blinding intensity of an affect eluding conscious elaboration. A powerful attraction…more intense than any word or idea: the narcissistic ambivalence of the melancholic affect alone finds, in order to represent itself, the image of death as the ultimate site of desire.19

Attraction to the Thing, Kristeva is careful to argue, is not proper desire, which requires an object. The economy of desire is animated by original loss made symbolic, integrated into the mature ego structure, establishing the necessary conditions for love. In direct attraction to the Thing, affect—the rhythmic pulse of the semiotic chora—governs, anterior to libidinal object relations.20 Accordingly, felt sensation is pre-­ linguistic, an intensity that exceeds ideas and words, eluding conscious elaboration. Furthermore, without recourse to a desired object, death—the Thing, the black sun, the planet Melancholia—becomes the melancholic’s ultimate site of desire. Yet one cannot possess it, as with objects—incorporate, devour, make one’s own. Merging with the Thing, consummating the powerful, subliminal attraction, spells the end. Thus for the melancholic, “suicide is not an act of war but a reuniting with sorrow and, beyond it, with that impossible love, never attained, always elsewhere. Such are the promises of the void, of death…” (Kristeva 1987, 7; 1989, 13). What this ultimately means is that death for Kristeva and von Trier runs counter to its figuration by proponents of linear time, for whom human development is a line from start to finish, the terminus of which is always “out there.” For Kristeva and von Trier, death is a going back, not progression but regression21—thus re-union with sorrow—and the Thing as

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referent to the pre-symbolic past points the way through compulsive attraction anterior to desire for the erotic object. Hence Kristeva locates in Freud’s primary masochism a link to narcissistic melancholia: it involves the death drive turned inward on the self, a disintegration of bonds that “we trace back to the original death drive of living matter” (Kristeva 1989, 17; quoting Freud). The question becomes: why? Why is death a matter of regression and a phenomenon of the past? The answer: because it is there in the beginning… * * * Thing precedes object, the mother is the origin of and threat to human life, psychotic fusion is the precondition for selfhood, the real comes before linguistic articulation and the deployment of signs. As such, the past is accordingly the ekstasis or the temporal tense of melancholia,22 the disorder characterized by regression, by falling back, by retardation, by asymbolia (as pre-linguistic), and by re-union with the primal compelled by attraction, spelling death. One need only consider the temporality operative in and as the Overture to Melancholia23 to confirm von Trier’s participation in this inherently tragic logic (cf. Part I). Though potentially deadly, however, melancholia is also lucid. At the frontier between life and death lies the source of insight into the tragedy of the human condition,24 allotted it seems, by time itself. Human life is from the beginning bound to death; all futures are bound to the past, all projections are bound to fall, subject to a profound gravity, cadere, as Kristeva is fond of reminding us.25 Thus Justine, the melancholic, is powerfully lucid. She knows things, as she tells her sister—from the trivial number of beans in the jar at the wedding, to the fact that there is no life in the universe other than that on earth, doomed to death by Melancholia’s inevitable arrival. Even Claire is not without her own emotional intuition, her own lucidity, though it pales in comparison to Justine’s. It is for this reason that Kristeva appeals to Aristotle, noting, “melancholia, counterbalanced by genius, is coextensive with man’s anxiety in Being…the forerunner of Heidegger’s anguish as the Stimmung of thought…melancholia as an extreme state and as an exceptionality that reveals the true nature of Being…” (Kristeva 1989, 7–8). Such lucidity accounts for Kristeva seeing in melancholia the possibility that sublimation could yield a compelling work of art—if only the melancholic succeeds in transforming the Thing without yielding to its powerful attraction.

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In conclusion, while Kristeva’s disclosure attends to the death drive through the melancholic attraction to the Thing, von Trier, by contrast (but also complementarily) comes at the amatory through the end of the world—death for all, and yet collision is seduction, attraction, enfolding and pure jouissance. That, from their opposite trajectories of approach, they arrive at the beating heart of this love-death double—that melancholia is proven to be the somber lining of amatory passion—is confirmed, finally, by the schematics of a melancholy temporality to which they are both intimately attuned.

Notes 1. She acknowledges a terminological confusion of melancholia and depression that she deliberately “keeps alive” at the outset (Kristeva 1989, 9). In a first effort at resolution, Kristeva insists the terms “melancholia” and “depression” refer to a “composite that might be called melancholy/ depressive, whose borders are in fact blurred” (10–11). 2. Cf. Kristeva (1989, 22 and 97–103). 3. Cf. Moondarksound (2011). 4. Cf. Figlerowicz (2012, 24). 5. Cf. Lechte (1990). 6. Consider Von Trier’s (interview) response, “When I…look at works of art that I like, they all contain melancholia to some point. I would describe it as being the salt you put in the food. You know, if you forgot to put it in, then you’ve got to have some melancholia at the table to make it become a real dish” (Bond 2016). 7. Cf. White (2012, 17). 8. “We saw the opening images very much as intricate paintings…the images are almost stills that have just a trace of movement…In general we wanted this sequence to have the expressive and emotional freedom that painting has” (White 2012, 20). 9. Cf. Kristeva (1989, 13). 10. Cf. McAfee (2004). 11. Cf. Kristeva (1984, 25). 12. Cf. Kristeva (1987, 7–8), and Kristeva (1989, 21–22). 13. Of the three valences of the term: (1) despondency versus exultation as they wax and wane in frequency and intensity according to the symptomology of a particular form of depression; (2) the “generic term” under which all forms of depression whose affect or mood is sadness/despair may be subsumed; and (3) a specific, that is, narcissistic form of depression that differs clinically and nosologically from other forms of depression but

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shares with them two common structural elements (object loss and failure of the signifier, of language), the last, narcissistic depression, is not attributed to Freud. Rather, this specific melancholia was discovered in and through the treatment of narcissistic individuals, leading “modern analysts to understand another form of depression” (Kristeva 1989, 12). 14. Cf. McAfee (2004, 59). 15. Cf. Lechte (1990, 33–34). 16. Cf. Kristeva (1989, 11). 17. Cf. Kristeva (1989, 9). 18. Cf. Kristeva (1989), Thing and Object, 13. Kristeva footnotes the first mention of the Thing with a reference to Heidegger (1967, 48, 243) (Kristeva 1989, 262). 19. Cf. Kristeva (1987, 10). 20. Cf. Kristeva (1987, 9). 21. Cf. Kristeva (1989), “The Thing is inscribed within us without memory, the buried accomplice of our unspeakable anguishes. One can imagine the delights of reunion that a regressive daydream promises through the nuptials of suicide” (14). 22. Cf. also Kristeva (1989, 60–61). 23. These images are, Von Trier insists, “previsions,” that show us the end at the beginning (cf. White 2012). Hence the Overture offers a prefiguration that is past in narrative sequentiality (the origin story always comes first) but future in its prophecy of what is to come. Von Trier explains that he wanted to make a film where the viewer knows from the outset how it will end but is nevertheless compelled to watch (Moondarksound 2011). This resonates analogically with the structure of mortality in human life: one knows death is inevitable yet invests in life nonetheless, riveted to its possibilities for meaning. 24. Cf. Kristeva (1989), (20). 25. Kristeva (1989, 4) (15).

References Bond, Lewis. 2016. Deconstructing Cinema: Von Trier/Criswell/Cinema Cartography. youtube.com, July 23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= xwhe1zDHrCQ. Camus, Albert. 1991. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Random House. Figlerowicz, Martha. 2012. Comedy of Abandon: Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia. Film Quarterly 65 (4): 21–26. Freud, Sigmund. 1964. Mourning and Melancholia. In (1914–1916): On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, ed. James Strachey, 242–258. Volume

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14 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1964. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1967. What Is a Thing? Trans. W.B.  Barton, Jr. and Vera Deutsch. Chicago: Henry Regnery. Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1987. On the Melancholy Imaginary. New Formations (3): 5–18. ———. 1989. Black Sun. Trans. Leon S.  Roudiez. New  York: Columbia University Press. Lechte, John. 1990. Art, Love, and Melancholy in the Work of Julia Kristeva. In Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, ed. John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin, 24–41. New York: Routledge. McAfee, Nöelle. 2004. Kristeva. New York: Routledge. Moondarksound. 2011. Lars Von Trier  – Melancholia Interview. youtube.com, September 18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qtr-7pkTxI. Oliver, Kelly. 1997. Introduction: Kristeva’s Revolutions. In The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver, xi–x1. New York: Columbia University Press. Shirley, Hugo. 2016. The Opera That Changed Music: Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. gramophone.co.uk, June 9. https://www.gramophone.co.uk/feature/ the-opera-that-changed-music-wagnerstristan-und-isolde. Von Trier, Lars, dir. 2011. Melancholia. Denmark: Zentropa, 2017. Prime Video (Streaming). White, Rob. 2012. Interview with Manuel Alberto Claro. Film Quarterly 65 (4): 17–20.

Index1

A Abram, David, 109, 110, 112–114 Absolute, 30, 32, 69, 71, 92, 96, 98 Absolute referent, 96–98 Action, 2, 5, 21, 23–28, 31, 33, 40, 43, 44, 50, 51, 54, 72, 80, 88, 89n1, 106, 124 Adam, 16, 54, 55 Affect, 122–124, 128, 130n13 Agamben, Giorgio, 50, 51, 58, 61n10 Agency, 38, 39, 43, 45n5 Aletheia, 48, 52 Alien, 68, 106 Alterity, 124 America, 38 Animal, 54, 68, 73, 105, 110 Anker, Elizabeth, 39, 40, 45, 45n2, 45n4 Anthropocentric, 110 Anti-black racism, 43 Antichrist, 63–76

Antichrist, 4, 5, 10, 15, 17n3, 49, 52–55, 58–60, 60n6, 64–71, 73–75, 80, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 100, 101n5 Anti-natalism, 110 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 5, 65, 67, 68, 70, 72–75, 76n1, 76n5, 76n6 Apocalypse, 3, 92, 93, 95–98, 100 Aporia, 4, 24–27, 32 Appearance/appearances, 12, 21, 28–30, 33, 48, 95, 97, 119 Archive, 96, 97, 100 Aristotle, 112, 129 Art, 1, 2, 4–6, 19, 21, 47–60, 96, 98, 99, 101n5, 105, 129, 130n6 Articulation, 40, 57, 110, 113, 114, 123, 128, 129 Artist, 2, 11, 49 Asymbolia, 129 Atheist, 74

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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INDEX

Audience, 2, 9, 11, 16, 20, 21, 24, 25, 30, 38, 41, 66, 71, 74, 120 Aztec, 72 B Badley, Linda, 11, 17n4 Bainbridge, Caroline, 9, 15, 17n2, 34n3, 45n3 Being/beings, 2, 8–11, 13, 14, 20, 21, 33, 40, 42, 43, 47–51, 54, 57–59, 60n1, 64–69, 71, 73–75, 76n4, 81, 82, 84, 85, 88, 97, 104, 106, 107, 109, 112, 113, 122–124, 129, 130n6 Belief, 4, 8, 11, 20–34, 44, 60n1, 64, 81, 94, 98, 99, 101n4 Benatar, David, 110, 111, 115n5 Binary/binaries, 5, 47–60, 67, 70, 72 Biocentrism, 107 Black people/black folks, 38–40, 44 Black sun, 121, 128 Black Sun, 118, 119, 121, 122, 128 Body, 1, 2, 5, 16, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45n6, 66–70, 72–74, 79, 80, 82–84, 93, 94, 109, 114, 121, 123, 126 Bond, Lewis, 130n6 Border-crossing, 65, 74 Borders, 65, 74, 75, 123, 130n1 Bradatan, Costica, 34n1 Bradshaw, Peter, 38 Breaking the Waves, 9–11, 80 Brechtian style, 41 Breughel, Pieter, 98 C Cadere, 129 Camus, Albert, 118 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 98

Casetti, Francesco, 34n4 Castration, 81, 84 Catholic, 64, 73 Chalchiuhtlicue, 72 Chance, 2, 26, 42, 64, 100, 107, 111 Chaos, 100 Chiaroscuro, 41 Chicana, 76n1 Chicomecoatl, 72 Chiesa, Lorenzo, 34n1 Child/children, 3, 5, 11, 23, 25, 51, 54–56, 65, 66, 69, 74, 79–89, 105, 123, 124, 126 Choice, 28, 64, 69, 118, 119, 126 Christ, 72 Christianity, 55, 64, 67, 73 Chthonic, 74 Cinema, 19, 20, 29, 33, 34n4, 92, 95, 97, 100 Cinema of the after-all, 95–97 Claxton, Susanne, 4, 50, 51 Clitoris, 56, 65, 73–75 Coatlicue, 67, 68, 70, 72 Coatlicue state, 67, 68, 70, 72–75, 76n6 Compassion, 21, 24–27, 34n2 Conceal, 5, 48, 59 Concealment, 48 Constellation of intelligibility, 48, 57, 60 Continuity editing, 31 Coppola, Francis Ford, 97 Corporeality, 70 Creativity, 66, 74 Culture, 4, 40, 48, 53, 58, 59, 70–72, 76n1, 113 D Dancer in the Dark, 10, 13, 80, 87, 88 De Beauvoir, Simone, 65, 69–71, 73 Death, 3, 5, 13, 14, 21, 53–58, 66–68, 71, 72, 74, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 94, 106, 118–130, 131n23

 INDEX 

Death Drive/The Drive, 3, 80–89, 120, 129 Demon, 68, 69, 75 Demonic possession, 65, 68 Denouement, 41, 44 Depression, 5, 15, 68, 85, 93, 104, 124–126, 130n1, 130–131n13 Derrida, Jacques, 92, 96–98, 100, 101n3 Desire, 1, 17n5, 32, 39, 40, 42–44, 70, 80–84, 86–89, 100n2, 124, 125, 127–129 Despair, 3, 64, 124, 126, 130n13 Development, 22, 33, 41, 55, 56, 107–112, 119, 122–124, 128 Devil, 64, 70, 75 Dichotomy/dichotomies, 50, 53, 71, 74 Dickens, Charles, 83 Diegesis/diegetic, 93, 95 Difference, 29, 119, 123 Disaster film, 91–93 Doctrine of ontological pluralism, 49 Dogville, 4, 10, 14, 41, 42 Dominance, 5, 38, 50, 58, 72, 74 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 52 Doughty, Ruth, 45n5 Drives, 22, 30, 68, 74, 81, 87, 119, 122–124, 129 Dualism, 50 Duality, 64, 66–68, 70, 72, 74, 76n4, 76n6, 94 Dynamism, 70 E Ebert, Roger, 45n1 Ecosystem, 111 Edelman, Lee, 81, 83 Ego, 124, 125, 128 Ekstasis, 129 Elbeshlawy, Ahmed, 45n6 Elkayam, Jessica, 5

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El mal aigre, 73, 76n5 Elsaesser, Thomas, 100n1 Emancipation, 39, 40, 45, 45n2, 45n4 Emotion, 4, 11, 20, 58, 66 End of the world, 3, 5, 92, 93, 96, 97, 104, 105, 107, 118–120, 126, 130 Entropy, 108 Environmental ethics, 107 Epictetus, 26, 28 Equilibrium, 70, 76n4 Erasure, 95, 97 Ethics, 21, 23, 24, 34n2 Eve, 54, 55 Evil, 27, 53, 55–59, 66, 70, 73, 74, 76n5, 85, 86 Exclude, 50, 51 Existence, 50, 65, 71, 83, 84, 95, 104–115, 115n2 Existential angst, 57 Existentialism, 65, 75 External goods, 26 F Fact, 9, 20, 32, 38, 48, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 72, 75, 87, 93, 97–100, 105, 110, 115n4, 118, 127, 129, 130n1 Falsity, 31, 48, 58 Fantasy, 5, 13, 79–89 Fantasy-desire complex, 88 Fear, 3, 9, 32, 56, 57, 73, 83, 85, 94, 125 Female, 4, 5, 11, 16, 49, 53–55, 65, 66, 70, 72, 74, 86, 88, 89 Feminine, 11, 49, 53–55, 58, 59, 67, 70, 76n4, 76n6 Feminist/feminists, 53, 65, 75 Fiction, 1, 30, 33, 40, 98, 100 Figlerowicz, Martha, 130n4 Film, 1, 8–16, 19–34, 38, 49, 65, 85, 91, 104–107, 118 Film critics, 53

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Flesh, 3, 71, 72, 109, 110, 114 Fluidity, 64, 66, 68, 70, 76n4 Fortune, 26 Freedom, 38–40, 45, 76n6, 82, 130n8 Freud, Sigmund, 80, 84, 88, 124, 128, 129, 131n13 Function, 93, 108, 112, 113, 126 Future-oriented, 81–86 G Galt, Rosalind, 34n3 Garden of Eden, 54, 55 Gaze, 34n4, 59 Geist, 109 Gender, 11, 34n3, 70 Genesis, 54 Gift, 14, 22, 34n1, 39 Glazebrook, Patricia, 61n10 God, 10, 12, 21, 31, 54, 55, 64, 67, 69, 71, 105 Goddess, 67, 68, 72, 74 Good, 16, 26, 27, 29, 53, 56–59, 64, 85, 105–107, 111, 112 Grief, 56, 65, 71, 80, 118 Guilt, 65, 66, 69, 70 Gurley, S. West, 3, 4, 89 H Happiness, 26, 64 Haro, José A., 4 Hatred, 125 Healthy neurotics, 85, 89 Hedonism, 106 Hegel, Georg Wilhem Friedrich, 109, 113 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 47–49, 53, 57, 60n2, 128, 129, 131n18 Heterosexual, 9, 65, 70 Hierarchy, 43, 71, 74 Hill, Karl Frederic, 98 Hjort, Mette, 34n5

Holland, Timothy, 5 Homosexual, 83 Horizon of experiences, 41 The House that Jack Built, 1, 2 Huitzilopochtli, 67 Huixtocuhuatl, 72 Human body, 112, 123 Human condition, 125, 129 Human existence, 50, 59, 104–115 Humanities/humanity, 5, 26, 58, 86, 92, 93, 100, 105 Human nature, 22, 23, 53 Human sciences, 113 Human species, 107, 108, 110–113 Husserl, Edmund, 122 Hysterical, 53, 66 I Identification, 2, 65, 124 Identity/identities, 43, 44, 65, 66, 70, 74, 75, 76n1 Identity politics, 11 Ideology, 20, 44, 45 The Idiots, 10, 87–89 The ihiyotl, 67 Ilamatlatolli, 66, 76n3 Illusion, 15, 20, 32, 81, 82 Imagination, 16, 68, 72, 73, 126 Impressions, 20, 21, 28, 29, 32, 39 Inscription, 95 Intuition, 99, 129 J Janaway, Christopher, 34n2 Jewish, 55 Jouissance, 12, 17n5, 80–83, 85, 86, 130 Judaism, 55 Judgment/judgments, 25, 26, 29, 32 Jump cuts, 31, 32 Justice, 4, 21–25

 INDEX 

K Kamuf, Peggy, 98 Kierkegaard, Soren, 10 Klee, Paul, 48 Knowledge, 13, 30, 67, 98, 109, 112–114 Koch, William H., 5 Kristeva, Julia, 5, 118, 119, 121–130, 130n1, 131n13, 131n18 L Lacan, Jacques, 80–82, 122, 124, 128 Lack, 5, 15, 22, 29, 32, 33, 43, 81, 85, 89, 97, 107, 111, 124, 126 Laine, Tarja, 20 La Llorona, 74 Language, 10, 65, 75, 76n1, 110, 113, 114, 122–124, 131n13 Latina, 65, 75 Lechte, John, 124 Liberalism, 41, 43, 44, 45n4 Liberation, 43, 44 Life, 3, 9, 11, 13–16, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30, 32–34, 41, 42, 48, 57, 58, 67, 68, 72–74, 80, 85, 86, 88, 89, 94, 96–98, 105, 106, 108, 110–115, 118, 119, 121–125, 129, 131n23 Life-affirming, 30 Light/lighting, 1, 4, 9, 28, 29, 41, 45, 51, 72, 82, 95, 104–106, 114, 119, 127 Lilith, 54–58, 60n7 Literature, 96, 98 Lloyd, Vincent, 45n4 Longtin, Rebecca A., 2, 4 Loss, 12, 55, 65, 68, 72, 81, 82, 86, 88, 97, 123–128, 131n13 Love, 23, 56, 64, 69, 71, 86, 124, 125, 128 Lovelock, James, 108

137

M Machismo, 76n6 Male, 4, 11, 49, 53, 65, 68–72, 74, 119 Malevich, Kazimir, 98 Manderlay, 4, 10, 14, 15, 38–45, 45n3, 45n5, 45n6 Man/men, 9, 11–15, 17n5, 24, 42, 49, 53–55, 58, 59, 64, 67, 69, 74, 75, 86, 119 Marcos, Sylvia, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 76n4 Marso, Lori, 34n3, 65 Masculine, 49, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 67, 70, 74, 76n4, 76n6 Masculinity, 65, 68, 75 Masturbation, 69, 84 Mazehuales, 72 McAfee, Nöelle, 122, 123 Meaning/meanings, 4, 30, 48, 49, 52, 60n1, 68, 73, 111–115, 122–124, 131n23 Medea, 80, 82, 84, 85, 89 Medea, 80, 83 Mediation, 83, 97 Melancholia, 15, 91–101, 104, 105, 107, 114, 118–130, 130n1, 130n6, 131n13 Melancholia, 5, 8, 10, 15, 17n3, 75, 80, 83–86, 91–100, 103–115, 117–131 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 109, 110, 112, 113 Mesoamerican thought, 64, 67, 70 Metaphor, 38, 76n1, 121, 122, 127 Metaphysics, 53, 57, 118 Method, 20, 22, 30, 31, 99, 118 Mexico, 64 Millais, John Everett, 96, 98 Mind, 10, 12, 16, 28, 54, 57, 66–68, 70, 72, 74, 80, 93, 105, 109 Misogyny, 2, 4, 9, 16, 34n3, 53, 66, 71

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INDEX

Modernism, 100n2 Modernity, 27, 74 Monosemic exactitude, 49, 60 Moondarksound, 131n23 Moral belief, 21–24, 26, 27, 29, 30 Moralists, 53 Morality, 22–24, 26–29, 33 Mother, 3, 13, 56, 64, 67, 69, 74, 75, 76n1, 76n6, 106, 123, 124, 126, 128, 129 Mystic, 71, 72 Myth, 43, 47–60, 81 N Naess, Arne, 108 Nahua tradition, 66 Narcissism, 71, 89 Narcissistic depression, 125, 131n13 Narrative, 23, 32, 39–42, 44, 94, 119–121, 131n23 Natural sciences, 113 Natural world, 110, 113, 114 Nature, 1–5, 9, 11, 20, 22, 23, 26, 28–31, 33, 48, 52, 53, 58, 59, 60n1, 66, 70, 75, 81–84, 86, 89, 92, 109, 129 Neurological disorders, 65, 68, 72 Neurosis, 66, 85, 125, 127 Neurotic/neurotics, 66, 82–85, 126 Neurotic psychic complex, 82 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 20, 21, 26–30, 32–34, 34n2 Nihilism, 21, 26, 27 Nobus, Dany, 20, 21, 34n1 Non-anthropocentric, 105–107, 110, 114 Nosotras, 5, 64–75 Nuclear war, 5, 96–98, 100 Nymphomaniac, 3, 85 Nymphomaniac, 10, 15, 75, 80, 83, 85, 86

O Object, 5, 15, 20, 30, 40, 44, 57, 69, 76n4, 81, 82, 89, 92, 105, 109, 122–129, 131n13 Objectal depression, 125 Objective, 26, 30, 32, 57, 59, 95, 105, 106 Objectivity, 32, 99, 127 Object of fantasy, 82, 85, 89 Objects, 128 Oedipus complex, 81 Ollin, 76n4, 76n6 Olmecs, 73 Optics, 28–34 Organic whole, 108, 110, 111, 113 Ortner, Sherry, 61n10 Otherized, 70, 71, 74 Overhead shots, 31, 32 P Pagan, 72 Pain, 12, 13, 24, 56, 58, 65, 72–74, 106, 107, 110, 111 Paradox of belief, 98, 100 Paradox of the referent, 98 Patai, Raphael, 55, 60n7 Pathology, 118, 124, 126 Patriarchy, 34n3, 53, 57 Pedersen, Hans, 5 Perception, 12, 15, 21, 28, 56, 60, 109, 113, 114 Perspectivism, 4, 20, 30, 32 Peterson, Christopher, 92, 95, 97 Phantasm, 3, 4, 19–34, 100 Philosophy, 1–6, 8, 9, 20–24, 27, 28, 101n3, 107, 108, 113 Pity, 24–27, 29 Plato, 9, 123 Play, 8, 16, 21, 28, 33, 58, 61n10, 71, 80, 84–87, 111, 120–122, 124

 INDEX 

Pleasure, 12, 15, 25, 49, 58, 65, 69, 73, 74, 83, 84, 86, 106, 107, 110, 111, 118 Plot, 21–25, 33, 41, 42 poiesis, 47, 48, 52 Politics, 4, 11 Polysemic/polysemy, 4, 47–49, 60 Positivism, 99 Power, 8, 14, 23, 26, 33, 38, 40, 51, 55, 65, 66, 71, 75, 94, 100, 107, 108, 112 Pre-objective Thing, 127 Present-oriented, 83 Progression, 128 Protestant, 73 R Race, 38, 40, 45n1, 104–115 Racial hierarchy, 43 Racism, 38, 39, 43, 44 Racist, 4 Rationality, 57, 67, 68, 73, 98, 99, 112, 113 Reading, 26, 38–40, 45n3, 52, 87, 89, 93, 97, 101n3 Realism, 19, 20, 31, 33 Reality, 13, 20, 21, 28, 30, 33, 44, 49, 57, 59, 67, 70, 72, 74, 75, 86, 88, 98 Reason, 1–4, 13, 21, 26, 28, 30, 38, 51, 53, 58, 81, 88, 105, 112, 114, 115, 129 Re-evaluate values/re-evaluation of values, 19–34 Reference, 13, 21, 83, 92, 93, 96, 97, 131n18 Reginster, Bernard, 34n2 Regression, 128, 129 Relativism, 32, 47 Rensais, Alain, 96

139

Representation/representations, 95, 98, 106, 127 Repression, 11 Resentment, 56, 82, 84 S Sacrifice, 3, 4, 8–16, 80–84, 87–89 Savior, 71 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 107, 110 Science, 5, 58, 99, 100, 108, 109, 113 Scientific knowledge, 98, 101n3 Scott, A.O., 115n1 Scrooge, 83, 86 Self, 56, 67, 68, 108, 123, 129 Self-consciousness, 109, 110 Selfhood, 27, 129 Self-perception, 110 Self-realization, 108 Self-sacrifice, 24, 26, 27, 34n2, 81–83, 86, 88, 89 Semiotic, 121, 122, 126 Semiotic chora/chora, 3, 122–125, 128 Seneca, 26 Sensuous, 109, 110 Sentient being, 106 Separation, 67, 124 Serpent, 55, 67, 70–74 Set, 13, 15, 16, 20, 26, 28, 30, 41, 50, 51, 58, 59, 72, 74, 96, 99, 112 Sex, 11, 17n5, 54, 59, 70, 75, 83, 89n1 Sexuality, 11, 53, 58, 59, 65, 74 Shaviro, Steven, 93, 98, 99, 100n2, 101n5 Signification, 96, 122, 128 Sign/signs, 21, 124, 129 Sinnerbrink, Robert, 20 Sin/sins, 55, 69, 71–73 Slavery, 14, 22, 23, 38, 42

140 

INDEX

Socrates, 9, 10 Soplo, 67 Sound stage, 20, 31, 41 Sovereign, 50–53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 69, 71 Sovereign power, 50 Sovereign rule, 50, 51 Spanish, 65, 76n5 Speak/speaking, 1, 3, 5, 8–10, 12, 14, 51, 57, 65, 75, 92, 96, 110, 122–124, 126 Spirit, 66, 69, 72–74, 109, 113 Spirituality, 72, 74 State of exception, 50, 51, 55, 58, 61n10 Stereotype, 38, 40, 44, 66 Stigmata, 72, 73 Stimmung, 129 Stoic/Stoics, 4, 20, 21, 26–29, 33, 34 Subject, 3, 26, 33, 38, 39, 51, 53, 56, 64, 69, 92, 100, 118, 122–124, 129 Subjectivism, 47 Subjectivity, 122 Sublimation, 69, 129 Suicide, 85, 128, 131n21 Superstition, 58, 72 Suprahuman, 68 Symbolic, 93, 96–98, 122–126, 128 Synthhomosexual, 83, 86, 87 Szendy, Peter, 94–97 T Tarkovsky, Andrei, 96, 97 Taylor, Paul, 107 Technology, 113 The teyolia, 67 Therapy, 16, 57 Thetic break, 123, 124, 126 Thetic phase, 122 The Thing, 125–130, 131n18, 131n21

Thinghood, 128 Third element, 50, 51, 59 Thomson, Iain, 49, 60n2 Tiny Tim, 83 The tonally, 67 Torres-Guevara, Rosario, 5 Tragedy, 59, 108, 120, 121, 129 Transcendent, 69 Trauma, 64, 80, 83, 84, 88, 124 Traversing the fantasy, 79–89 Truth, 8–10, 30, 32, 47–49, 52, 56, 58, 68, 92, 98, 105, 114 U Unconceal, 49, 51–53, 58, 60n1 Unconcealment, 48, 49, 52, 57 Underworld, 67 United States, 21, 38–41, 44, 45, 45n1 V Vagina dentata, 73 Value/values, 4, 19–34, 39, 42, 43, 52, 56, 60n1, 83, 107, 114 Violence, 2, 23, 25, 29, 39, 44, 53 Virgin of Guadalupe, 69 Virtue, 10, 26, 27, 97, 113 Void, 96, 123, 124, 126, 128 Von Trier, Lars, 1–5, 8–16, 19–22, 24, 25, 27, 29–33, 34n3–5, 38–41, 44, 45, 49, 52, 53, 58, 59, 64–68, 70–75, 79–89, 91–98, 100, 100n2, 104–107, 118–122, 125, 127–130, 130n6, 131n23 W Wagner, Richard, 94, 100n2, 105, 120 White, Rob, 99, 130n8, 131n23

 INDEX 

Whiteness, 38–45 White people/white folks, 38, 39, 42, 44, 45 White supremacist universe, 39 White supremacy, 39, 40, 42, 45 Wilderness, 71, 73, 76n1 Wild tongue, 3, 64–75 Wilmington, Michael, 45n1 Windeløv, Vibeke, 11 Wissenschaft, 113 Witchcraft, 66, 71, 72 Witches, 66, 72

141

Woman/women, 4, 8–16, 22, 34n3, 42, 44, 53–56, 58, 59, 64–75, 76n1, 76n6, 80, 86, 89, 121 Womanhood, 66, 73–75, 76n1 World, 3–5, 13–15, 20, 21, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34n4, 38, 41, 53, 57, 59, 60, 60n1, 67, 70, 72, 73, 85–88, 92–100, 105, 108–110, 112–114, 119–121, 126, 130 Z Zizek, Slavoj, 17n5